The Holly and the Hawthorn
by Haiza Tyri
Summary: Some months after the defeat of Lord Voldemort, Narcissa Malfoy asks a Muggle to help her traumatized son. Meanwhile, Hogwarts gets a very unusual Slytherin student. Very mildly crossed-over with Sherlock Holmes.
1. Three Months Later

**Author's Note: I never expected to write a Harry Potter story, but, while not a Malfoy fan, I grew interested in the pathology and trauma of the Malfoy family. This story developed itself as I contemplated what it would take to turn Draco Malfoy into a normal, functioning member of [wizarding] society.**

**Chapter titles are from a poem by Emily Brontë called "Love and Friendship," from the Christmas carol "The Holly And The Ivy," and from the poem "The Hawthorne Tree" by Siegfried Sassoon.  
**

* * *

**Three Months Later, or**

**Friendship Like the Holly-Tree**

**Chapter 1**

When Narcissa Malfoy showed up at Dita Bonhomme's door, Dita was not surprised. She had been waiting for this visit for a long time. Once she had been afraid of it. Narcissa Malfoy could kill her in an instant and leave no trace. But now there was nothing to fear, everything to pity. And perhaps there had been everything to pity from the beginning.

Narcissa was not the same woman who might have shown up on Dita's doorstep a few years ago. Though she tried to bear herself with the same hauteur, it was clear she was a broken and desperate woman. "Miss Perdita Bonhomme?" she inquired.

"You have the right house, Lady Malfoy," Dita answered calmly.

Narcissa's eyebrows went up. "You know me?"

"Of course I do. Please come in."

The tall woman, towering over the other, looked slightly dazed as she entered the small, quirky house. But then, she had already looked a little dazed before. She sat, automatically elegant, on the chair Dita offered her and put out her hands for the teacup the dark-haired woman gave her. She was still enough herself to be faintly approving when the milk went in after the tea rather than before.

"How long have you known your son was missing?"

Narcissa's lips parted in an involuntary, "_What?"_ She took a deep breath. "How—how did you know that?"

"It's simple. Your hat is on backward."

Narcissa stared at her uncomprehendingly.

"You're desperately trying to pull yourself together, dealing with your new status, trying to still be who you are while being different. But this morning you put your hat on backward. You are desperately worried, but at the same time you're not confident in calling it an emergency. And y_ou,_ of all people, have not just come to me for a social call. If you were going to rub my face in anything, you would have done it six months or six years ago, and you're not the sort of person to come to me _now_ unless you had no other options. I find lost people. You're missing someone, and it's not Lucius, because you would never come to _me_ about it. But your son? You would do anything for him. If the reports are true, you _have_ done anything for him. After what you've been through, coming to me is nothing. You've lost everything, except what really matters, but now you're afraid you're losing him, too."

The teacup clattered in its saucer, and Narcissa covered her face with shaking hands. "It's true," she said, trying not to sob. "Draco is gone. Of his own free will, I believe, but at the same time I feel that there is danger, and no—no one will help me!"

"No one believes you."

"They say, of course Draco left—after the way we let him down—what we allowed to happen to him—his whole world was destroyed—he had to go find himself… It's true, all of it, but what they are really saying is that _we_ are the last people the Ministry of Magic will help—we Malfoys."

"I believe you. Tell me everything that happened to you and to Draco after the Dark Lord was defeated."

Narcissa stared at her again. "How do you know about any of this? You're—you're a _Muggle!"_

Dita raised an amused eyebrow at her. "You forget what I do for a living. I find people even the CID can't find. You pure-bloods believe you're so much more intelligent and educated than the Muggle world, but you're not as much smarter as you think you are. In addition, I have known Lucius. It is impossible to know him without learning more about his world."

Her guest's lips tightened at the mention of her husband.

"I'm sorry," Dita said, "but I'm only telling you the truth. I'm not proud of having known your husband, but it is the truth about how I know your world, and it's what will enable me to help you. Now, tell me, Lady Malfoy."

Narcissa took another deep breath and began to tell her. About the three Malfoys returning, dazed, to their home, which had been left to them along with little else. About Lucius' depressions and rages. About Draco wandering around in a daze, avoiding everyone, lashing out whenever she tried to reach out to him. About the last several months of them trying, laughably, to be a normal wizarding family, avoided by everyone, impressing no one, particularly not themselves. About a final raging argument with Draco and his disappearance the following day with only a note saying he was going to where no one knew who he was.

"I thought it would be good for him to get away from England and from all this, but all this time I have had such a sense of foreboding, and no one will believe me, not even Lucius."

"I believe you," Dita repeated. "Sometimes mothers know things. It's odd, isn't it? I should know, if…"

"If your daughter were in danger," Narcissa finished for her.

Dita looked down at her hands. "Yes. I didn't mean to bring her up. I'm sorry. I will do what I can for you, Lady Malfoy."

"Why?" Narcissa demanded, something like her old sneer returning to her face. "Guilt?"

"No," Dita said. "I dealt with my guilt long ago. I've never felt I owed you anything. I did wrong—I even wronged you, I know I did. But you more than paid me and every other Muggle out for it."

Her face white, Narcissa bit her red lips, struggling with herself. Her motherhood won out. "I don't care about that anymore. Right now I only care about Draco. If you'll help me, I'll do whatever I can—for you—for your daughter."

"My daughter?" Dita repeated. "What could you possibly do for my daughter?"

"Had you…any idea of sending her to Hogwarts? Unless she's a…"

"Squib? She's not. But she's fifteen years old. A little old, don't you think?"

"Everything's different now. Many people are dead. They may be taking anyone. If she is not a squib, why didn't you send her to Hogwarts four years ago?"

Now it was Dita's turn to compress her lips. "She had an invitation, but I didn't want her to be in that environment, not with the baggage of who she is."

"Half-Muggle? There are all kinds of that sort at Hogwarts."

"Half-Wizard. Half—"

"You don't need to finish," Narcissa said coldly. "I know what you mean."

"Ensuing events have proven me correct," Dita said. "Hardly anyone knows she exists. She has not had to grow up with the weight of being who she is. She is a happy—if strange—child. She should be home from her private lessons at any moment, so if you wish to return tomorrow—"

"No—Please—"

Dita stared at Narcissa. "You want to meet her?"

"Please."

As they stared at each other, they heard the sound of the back door opening. "Mum? I'm home!"

Narcissa rose, her face a little pinched.

"I'm in here," Dita called back.

Her daughter came into the living room, swinging a bookbag down from her shoulder. She stopped short at the sight of a guest, especially such a strange-looking guest. Narcissa barely withheld a gasp.

Mother and daughter bore very little resemblance to each other. The girl was slender and slightly taller than the mother; while the mother had short, curly dark hair, the girl's was long, straight, and white-blond, springing back from a sharp widow's peak on her forehead. Her skin was a familiar, elegant pale, and her chin was sharp, her cheekbones high. Only her eyes were like her mother's, sapphire blue, keen and perpetually amused. Other than her eyes and the amusement, she could have been a twin to— Narcissa tried not to gasp again.

"Narcissa Malfoy, this is my daughter, Lucia Bonnefoy."


	2. An Invitation

**An Invitation, or **

**Scorn the Silly Rose-Wreath Now**

**Chapter 2**

"Mummy, was that _his_ mother?"

"Yes, darling, and his father's wife," Dita answered gently.

"Does he—he doesn't want me—does he?"

"Lucius Malfoy is in no position to demand anything. Honestly, darling, he has so much wrong going on in his life right now that I think you are the last thing he is thinking of."

Lucia gave a sigh of relief. "Then what did she want?"

"Tell me what you think."

Relieved of her fear, Lucia took a moment to think and look over the image of the beautiful Lady Malfoy in her mind's eye. "She's scared. She came to you for help! Is someone missing? Did—did someone do something to Lucius? Or to Draco? Coming to you instead of to one of her own people…That's desperate, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is. Draco left home, and now his mother is afraid something has happened to him."

"Are you going to find him?"

"Of course I am. After the way that poor boy's parents have thoroughly destroyed his life, it's about time he had some better influences."

"Like you?"

"Like both of us, darling. He is your brother, after all. Maybe if I hadn't been so obstinate and allowed you to go Hogwarts, you might have been a good influence on him all along."

Lucia shook her head. "Do you really think he'd have anything to do with me, his Muggle-born half-sister? He'd consider me a disgrace to the whole Malfoy family."

"But the truth is that the Malfoy family is a disgrace to you and to themselves. Being raised as he was is not conducive to happiness, you know. When you try to stake your entire identity on being better than others, you can't trust anyone, you can't make true friends, and the moment someone comes along who is better, your whole world crumbles. That's what's happened to him. He's got nothing left anymore. He needs more help than just _finding._ His father won't do it. His mother _can't_ do it. It's up to us."

Lucia pressed her lips together, looking, though she didn't know it, suddenly quite like her mother. "I've never understood why you—what you saw in him—in Lucius. You told me who he was, four years ago, when the first owl came, and you've never hidden from me the—the sort of person he is, but _why?_ Why did you…?"

"Because I was an idiot," her mother said bluntly. "I was very young—sixteen years ago he was handsome, romantic, mysterious—and though I didn't know it, it was just after their first war, and the Dark Lord was gone, and he was in the same sort of confusion Draco now is. He was…appealing—romantic. And I was young and stupid—and very pretty, which is the only thing I can attribute his paying attention to a Muggle to. I didn't know he was married and had a little boy, nor what kind of an odd life he lived. I didn't find that out until later—when you started showing strange talents, and I had to find out what was going on. What I found out scared me to death—but you know all that. Thank goodness you were intelligent enough not to make a fuss about not going to Hogwarts."

"After what you told me, I didn't want to. Having my own private tutor was better."

"It was very kind of Professor Dumbledore to send her, wasn't it? He agreed with me that keeping you away from the Malfoys would be the best thing to do. In fact, he seemed to think it would be extremely important. At least it kept you out of that horrible war they had."

"Mum…" Lucia said, twisting her thin, white hands together, "did you ever…regret having me? I mean, being connected to the Malfoys this way…"

"Absolutely not! What I did—my affair with Lucius—it was wrong, but that you came from it I have never regretted. I had no one before you came. Hugh Bonhomme, the dear man who adopted me, died just a year before I met Lucius—and maybe missing him and being so alone was one of the reasons I let myself be carried away by a tall, slender man with long blond hair and grey eyes. But after Lucius disappeared out of my life, I discovered I was pregnant—and I was glad. I _wanted_ you."

"Were you afraid I would end up like _him?"_

"I didn't know what he was like then," she said sadly. "And I thought, if I only raised you wisely, you would turn out alright. And so you have. And you haven't got all your good qualities from me alone, you know."

"No, I got them from your great-grandfather," Lucia said with a laugh.

Dita laughed with her. "His musical talent, certainly, but not his peculiar temper, his tendency to alienate people, and his propensity to addiction, my dear. But listen. From what I've learned of the Malfoys, there's a sharpness to them, a keenness of intellect, a strength of personality that can be as good as it can bad. They have a propensity for greatness, and they have always been leaders, and when greatness is governed by goodness, it contributes to the welfare of everyone. Greatness and ambition are not things to be feared when they are coupled with wisdom and humility. Do you understand?"

"I don't know—I think so."

"You will, eventually. Now—"

She was interrupted by a scrabbling sound at the kitchen door, a sound which sounded strangely familiar. Lucia sprang up and opened the door, and they both watched, dumbfounded, as a grey owl flew in and landed on the table, depositing there a large envelope clearly marked with the insignia they had seen once before, the Hogwarts coat of arms of eagle, snake, badger, and lion. They watched as the owl stuck its head into Dita's cup of coffee, drank deeply, shook itself, hooted softly, and flew away again.

"But—"

"Strange," Dita murmured. "Narcissa brought up Hogwarts this afternoon, and here we have this."

"Are you going to open it?"

"It's addressed to you."

Lucia opened the heavy envelope and pulled out a familiar letter on familiar, parchment-like letterhead. The last one, four years ago, had named Albus Dumbledore as Headmaster. This one named Minerva McGonagall as Headmistress and was written by her.

_Dear Miss Bonnefoy,_

_ Four years ago, Albus Dumbledore informed me of your decision to refuse entry to Hogwarts and of his agreement to this unusual course of action. He has since informed me, by a letter he left behind, of the wise and logical reasons for this._

_ Now, however, the time has come to once again offer you a place in the school. Our ranks have been much reduced lately, and any student, no matter her age, will be welcomed gladly. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment._

_ Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July._

_Yours sincerely, _

_Minerva McGonagall,_

_Headmistress_

"But we don't have an owl," Lucia said blankly.


	3. Malfoy Spaces

**Malfoy Spaces, or **

**Wait Till Winter Comes Again**

**Chapter 3**

"Take my arm," Narcissa said.

Uncertainly Dita did. The world turned upside down and inside out, and when it righted itself, she felt as if _she_ had turned inside out. It was some moments before she realized she was no longer in her own little house but in a large room that must have been the size of her whole house. Shakily she stopped clutching Narcissa's arm.

"What—what was that?"

"We Apparated. Now you must be quick. Lucius must not learn you are here. Do what you have come to do."

Dita shook her head to clear it and looked rapidly around the room. What a room for a boy to have grown up in! Vast and opulent, with a massive walnut four-poster bed, brocaded sofas and chairs, a large, elaborately carved mahogany desk, and grand paintings, it was also oddly oppressive, all dark toned and dismal. Over a huge fireplace hung a large portrait of a handsome man, nearly the exact image of Lucius, dressed in a voluminous, double-breasted black robe cinched in at the waist and glossy black top hat, carrying a slender stick and standing in a lordly manner, one hand on his hip, his shoulders back and his dark eyes glaring down his nose.

"That is Acheron Malfoy, one of Draco's greatest ancestors. Unfortunately for the Wizarding world, he died in a fire at another of the great houses in the 1840s."

_Unfortunately?_ Dita thought. _"Fortunately" is probably the better word. Weren't _any_ of you Malfoys decent?_ She said nothing, however, but when the man in the painting finished glaring at her and swung away with an audible, _Hmph!,_ her heart almost leapt out of her chest. "He—he just—"

"Of course he did," Narcissa said frostily. "He has better things to do than stand around staring at a Muggle."

Regaining her composure, Dita snuck one last look at the now-empty frame, then turned away to examine Draco's personal effects.

She supposed they were probably normal for a boy of eighteen in the Wizarding world. Rows of black and green robes in the massive walnut wardrobe, old-fashioned brooms cluttering up corners, posters of sports players where the images moved, strange knickknacks she had never seen before, moving photographs of family members, rows of old schoolbooks with odd titles like _The Standard Book of Spells_ and _Advanced Potion-Making._ Everything looked very expensive.

"There are no pictures of his friends. Did he destroy them, or did he not have any?"

Narcissa snapped, "Pictures or friends?"

"Either."

"Of course he had friends! He was a very popular boy at school. He led his House."

"Were they friends or followers? Confidants or sycophants? Narcissa, you have to tell me the truth. There's more at stake than your pride."

Narcissa set her jaw. "He had many followers, stupid but useful children. Of his 'friends'—they deserted him. He used to have pictures of them. He probably burnt them."

Dita was getting a better and better picture of the life an arrogant, pure-blooded Malfoy was expected to live. It sounded like a lonely one. She swiftly looked through the books, gaining a rapid understanding of the subjects he excelled in (_Potions_ had some very complicated-looking scribbles in it; _Quidditch Through the Ages_ had a number of neatly-drawn diagrams; _Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them_ was scrawled over with exceedingly bad words; _Unfogging the Future_ looked like it had never even been opened) and also of things he was trying to put behind him. A much-thumbed-through book called _Today's Pure-Blooded Families_ had the inscription on the flyleaf nearly completely obliterated, but by examining the markings left on the back of the page, Dita could see that it had read, "To Draco. Happy Christmas! From Pansy." Another book had a narrow hole driven through it, an innocuous-looking book called, _Repairing Your Magical Artifact._ She held it up with an inquiring eyebrow.

"I found that on his desk," Narcissa said, her voice subdued. "Here." She put her slender finger where there was a deep gouge in the desk. "He had stabbed a small, antique sword completely through it."

"That took some strength. Anger. Rage, more like. Is that unusual, doing something physical instead of magical?"

"Yes, it is, but he has no wand. That—that _Potter_ boy took it. Draco is very good at non-wand and nonverbal spells, but without his wand—how will he survive?"

"As well as any Muggle, I suppose. Why this book? What's important about it?"

Narcissa's white fingers curled around the book, turning even whiter. Her lips pressed together, going nearly white as well.

"It's something to do with what happened—with the War. I know a great deal about it. You'd better tell me about his part in it. I have to know, if you want me to help him."

"We were to have so much power! That was promised to us, that anyone who followed the Dark Lord would be granted great power under his rule. _Power."_ She spat the word. "All it really meant was slavery—to _him._ He used my boy as his _lackey_—his private assassin. 'Demonstrate your loyalty by killing your headmaster.' Draco demonstrated his loyalty—to _us._ Everything he did, he did for _us,_ his parents, who tried to push him into the same slavery we were under. We didn't understand—Lucius still doesn't understand. He can't see what it did to Draco—my dear boy—"

She was weeping suddenly, too overcome to be ashamed before this Muggle rival of hers. Dita took her hand and led her to a seat, sat down near her.

"Please tell me everything. Start with when he was a child. Tell me what he was like, right up until the day he left home."

Narcissa stared at her as she leaned back in her chair, folded her hands beneath her chin, and closed her eyes. When there was nothing but silence, Dita opened her eyes again.

"I will be listening closely. Please."

* * *

**Author Note: Acheron Malfoy is a tip of the hat to a character created by Jasper Fforde in his delightful book _The Eyre Affair._ His quite appallingly horrid character Acheron dies in the destruction of Rochester Hall in the book _Jane Eyre,_ by Charlotte Brontë. Yes, it's complicated.**


	4. The Holly Wand

**The Holly Wand, or**

**Deck Thee With the Holly's Sheen**

**Chapter 4**

Excitement thrilled through Lucia as she watched Lena Precipa examine the bricks in the courtyard. She was really, at last, going to that world which she had only heard about, second-hand, through books and this sweet woman Professor Dumbledore had sent to teach her. Her education had been quite thorough but largely academic, because Miss Precipa, while the kindest woman in the world and very knowledgeable, was almost a Squib.

That was what she had said the first time Lucia and Dita met her four years ago, when she showed up on their doorstep, the purple of her strange dress contrasting oddly with the glossy dark green and red of the two holly trees on either side of the door. "I was in Ravenclaw," she told them, drinking tea in their living room. "I was one of the brightest students in my year, could learn anything in a book, even corrected dear Professor Binns in History of Magic once, but I failed miserably in Charms, in Transfigurations—anything that required a wand. It's all in my brains and not in my fingers, and no one wants to hire someone like that. But that's exactly what Professor Dumbledore wants. He wants you to learn everything so you're not behind, but he doesn't want you attracting attention with spells and things. So he sent me. That's exactly like him; he can always find the right place for a person without a place." She beamed at them over round spectacles with purple rims.

It was Miss Precipa who convinced Dita that they ought to accept the second invitation from Professor McGonagall and send Lucia to Hogwarts at age fifteen and she who loaned them the owl to send their reply. Now she was accompanying Lucia to Diagon Alley for her school supplies while Dita went with Narcissa to perform her investigations into the history of Lucia's missing half-brother.

"Dear, are you sure you don't want this nice hood I brought you?" She held up a sweater with its hood, and Lucia shook her head a little stiffly.

"I told you, I'm not going to start out by hiding who I am. People will learn soon enough that I'm not like the Malfoys, and the sooner the better."

"You have a mind of your own, which is a good thing, but I'm afraid you'll soon learn that people will be too willing to judge you for who you look like, not for who you actually are." She shook her curly grey head and tapped the bricks with her little willow wand. For a moment nothing happened, and then she tapped them again, and reluctantly they began moving. "And that's about the only thing this wand in my hands is good for. Come along, dear."

Diagon Alley was a wonderland, and for a little while Lucia could only stand with whirling head and watch all the people in their odd clothes and gaze at the odd shops with their odd products. Miss Precipa, with a chuckle, let her stand and stare.

"It's so nice to see it back to what it's supposed to be. Recently it was quite dampening to come here. Everyone was so afraid, but now it's going back to normal."

"Miss Precipa, what's that?" Lucia pointed down the lane to a tall building that had the appearance of a person who had gone out dressed up for a silly Hallowe'en party and had been abducted and blinded along the way. It was bright and joyous-looking, but it was all boarded up.

"Oh, dear." Miss Precipa shook her head sadly. "That's one of the saddest stories to come out of the War. During the time when all was darkest and saddest, a pair of twins called Fred and George Weasley started that shop, Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, and it was the one bright spot in this whole place. They thumbed their noses at Vol—at You-Know-Who, and at the Ministry, and at everything that kept people from joy, and they made children laugh. But one of the twins, Fred, he died in the Battle of Hogwarts, and they say his twin George has never been the same since. No one knows whether he's going to reopen the shop or not. I think it would do him good, but it just wouldn't be the same without his brother."

"Oh," Lucia said softly. "I can't imagine losing a sibling, let alone a twin. I wonder if it's anything like going your whole life with a sibling you've never met." She shook her head. "I doubt it."

"Well, it's only been three months. Poor George just needs a little time. I hope he knows how much people miss him, as well as his brother. Now, come along, dear. The most important thing first: a proper wand. We'll go to Ollivander's. Of course the poor man's never been the same since being tortured at—" She stopped with a quick glance at Lucia.

"At what?"

"At Malfoy Manor, they say," she said reluctantly.

"Then he's not going to like me much, is he?"

"Well, the business side of things has been taken over by his nephew, Young Ollivander, as they call him. Old Ollivander still makes the wands, but he's been keeping away from people a bit."

Miss Precipa led Lucia into a tiny, old shop lined with rows and rows of tiny boxes, a very quiet shop but one that made her nerve ends tingle. She could almost feel the ends of her hair crackling. A man came quickly out of a back room, a tall man with pale grey eyes and pale, parchment-like skin. He was not the Young Ollivander barely out of his teen years of her ready imagination but was probably twenty years older than her mother; if this was "Young" Ollivander, then Old Ollivander must be quite old. He stopped short when he saw them, staring at Lucia through narrowed eyes.

"Oh. Dear. Another Malfoy. Young Lucia Malfoy, I think? My uncle was wondering if you would ever come here. He was rather hoping you wouldn't."

"Bonnefoy," Lucia said.

"What?"

"My name is Lucia Bonnefoy. Not Malfoy."

"Bonnefoy? But you're—"

"Yes, I'm Lucius Malfoy's daughter. I can't help it. But I'm not a Malfoy."

"Taking a stand, are you? That could be significant. Then you may not go in for the normal Malfoy woods—walnut, elm, hawthorn, yew."

"I've never had an affinity for those woods."

"What do you mean?" he asked swiftly.

"Show him your wand, Lucia," Miss Precipa said.

"But if you already have a wand—"

Lucia pulled her wand out of her purse and unwrapped the black velvet from around it. It was a heavy, slender piece of whitish wood, still looking as though it had come straight from the tree, though sanded and polished a little. "I made it. It's holly. Every time I touch holly, I get this sort of chill, kind of a tingle, like the tree recognizes me. I have an ancestor whose last name comes from the word _holly_—though he was probably a Muggle, else you would have heard of him. So when I learned that people do spells and things with wands, I thought I'd see if holly does anything for me."

"And does it?" he asked, sounding as if he was holding his breath for the answer.

"It does, though not as well as a proper wand. It takes a lot of concentration to make it work. I didn't know how to put the right kind of core in it or even where to get the right materials."

"It's a good thing you didn't!" Young Ollivander exclaimed. "You don't have the slightest idea how dangerous it is to play about with wood and core materials, do you?"

"I had a kind of idea, which is why I never tried to get any core materials. It seems logical that if you have the right materials but don't know what you're doing, you could cause a lot of destruction."

"You certainly could. If you knew the tales of the horrors of being an apprentice wandmaker, you would run far away. But maybe you have some talent. It's very few people who manage to make their own working wands, especially without a core. But it looks like it's holly for you. Try this one." He took down a long box and handed her a long wand, longer than her own and more gracefully-shaped but the same sort of white colour. "Holly and dragon heartstring, twelve inches, rigid. Do you feel anything?"

"Only what I feel normally when I touch holly. Should there be more?"

"Yes." He snatched it from her and put it back in its box. "Try this. Also dragon heartstring, but eleven and three-quarter inches, supple."

Nothing. Young Ollivander worked his way through every holly wand in the shop and came up with nothing.

"Can we be wrong about the holly?" he wondered. "Let me consult my uncle."

He disappeared into the back. After a moment they heard a kind of growl. "Why didn't you tell me she was here, you young idiot? Give her this one. Just made. No, I don't want to see her, but I made her her wand. Orders from Hogwarts. From Dumbledore before his death, apparently. That man knew more about the future than was good for him, I say."

Lucia and Miss Precipa gave each other wondering looks as Young Ollivander came back with another box.

"Try this, Miss Bonnefoy."

The wand was long, slender, grey-white. When she picked it up out of the box, it did more than tingle in her fingertips. It sang high, clear, and cold through her blood, and a swirl of silver sparks came out of it, whirling around her. In the background she barely heard Young Ollivander saying, "Thirteen inches, reasonably swishy. It's an odd pairing, this wand."

"Why?" Miss Precipa asked.

"The core…it's unicorn hair. Not just any old unicorn, either. My uncle gathered hair from the same unicorn twice, once when it was a foal and once when it was a young stallion. He used the white adult hair to make a particular wand, hawthorn, ten inches, reasonably springy. He put the silver foal hair aside, once he learned who he had made the hawthorn wand for. It ended up being a wand of great significance to us all."

"Whose was it?" Lucia asked.

"Draco Malfoy's."

In the sudden silence, she felt her heart thud.

"My brother's."

"Yes. Young Malfoy used it to disarm Professor Dumbledore of the Elder Wand. Later Harry Potter took it from him, and because of that the Elder Wand carried by the Dark Lord would not harm Harry Potter, and the Dark Lord was defeated."

"Defeated because my brother lost his wand."

"Yes. And there you have its brother. Or sister, whichever you prefer. It has the silver foal hair. Not only that, but the wood is from the same tree as Harry Potter's wand. Holly can repel evil, but its sap is also poisonous. When were you born?"

Startled, Lucia said, "August first, 1983. I'm not quite fifteen."

"Two days and three years after Harry Potter, Miss Bonnefoy. Holly presides over all who are born between July 8 and August 4."

"But what does it mean?" Miss Precipa inquired. "The wood of Harry Potter's wand, the core of Draco Malfoy's wand, and a long history of holly in this girl's Muggle family…?"

"I don't know. Nor does my uncle. Apparently Albus Dumbledore did, but he's dead, and no one else knows."

"I'll just have to learn it for myself," Lucia said.


	5. The Dancing Men

******The Dancing Men**, or

**Should My Youth Some Harshness Show**

**Chapter 5**

"Is there anything else you want to tell me? Anything at all?" Dita asked.

Narcissa hesitated.

"What is it? Even if you don't think it's important."

"It may not help you at all. It certainly hasn't helped me. But perhaps you should see this."

She went to the wall by the fireplace, took out from somewhere a stick Dita realized must be a wand, and tapped the wall with a muttered statement. Dita didn't understand it, but it sounded Latin. Part of the wall faded away, and Narcissa reached her hand in and came out with a leather-bound book which she brought to Dita.

"When Draco first started Hogwarts, we bought him this diary, in case he wished to record his academic triumphs. Our library is full of the personal historical records of Malfoy achievements. Well, he did, and he continued writing in it all through school. It is bewitched so that no matter how much you write, there are always more pages. But I've never been able to read it. I have tried every encryption spell I know to make these pages give up their secrets, and none of them have worked."

Dita opened the book, and for a moment her mind boggled at the rows and rows of stick figures of the sort every schoolchild scribbles when he's bored in class. But these were no bored scribbles. Every page of the fat journal was covered in them, row after row, neat as writing. After staring for a moment, she began to laugh, long and hard. Narcissa stared at her as if she had gone crazy.

"Of course your little spells don't work! This is just plain writing, with a _pen._ It's a code, pure and simple, nothing to do with spells. In fact, it's so far from having to do with your world it's no wonder you could never figure it out! These are the Dancing Men!" She laughed again until tears came to her eyes.

Narcissa still stared at her, uncomprehending.

"This is a code from a Muggle book, and oddly enough, it's a Muggle book about one of _my_ ancestors, my great-grandfather. He solved a mystery involving this enigmatic code of the Dancing Men. I'm sure many a child over the last hundred years has had a lovely time writing coded messages to his friends with it, since the story was published. But I thought your sort didn't read Muggle books. I mean your particular sort."

"We don't," Narcissa said coldly. "I can't imagine how he might have gotten his hands on such a thing…" She trailed off.

"Or do you?"

"Once, when he was eight, he brought a Muggle child home. When his father found out he had made friends with a _Muggle,_ he beat him, and that was the end of that."

Dita winced, thanking mercy she had kept Lucia far away from such a father. "Eight years old is exactly the right age to start being interested in ciphers, and it's also the age many a boy becomes interested in the sorts of stories this particular cipher comes from. And no wonder he decided to write his diary in code. What boy wants his _mother_ prying into his journal?"

Narcissa said stiffly, "It was my duty to know everything about my son."

"Huh," Dita said, unconvinced.

"Can you decipher it?"

"I can give it a try. If it's close to the original, it'll be easy, but he may have improved it over the years. Let me take it and try to work it out."

Narcissa nodded her head, slightly unwilling. "You should go. You have already been here far longer than I intended."

"It was necessary. Everything you have told me will help me to track your son."

"I don't see how learning about his schoolwork at Hogwarts can help you find him."

"I learned about far more than his schoolwork. Everything has come together to give me a complete picture of Draco, which will help me understand where he is likely to go and what he is likely to do. Now you'll have to take me home. I can't do that thing—Apparate."

Seconds later she was home and Narcissa was gone again. Making herself a strong cup of tea to counteract the unpleasant effects of Apparating, she sat down at her desk with the journal and was just reaching for the source material she wanted when Lucia returned home, dropping odd packages all over the table.

"Well, my dear, did you have a good time?"

"Some of the time. Look at this!" She shook a long black cloak out of a package and whirled it around her. "Hogwarts robes. Strange, isn't it?"

"A bit," Dita admitted. In black, Lucia looked more like a Malfoy than ever. She was usually given to dressing in paler colors, white, cream, beige, grey, looking like a little elfin creature when she did so. In black, all her aristocratic bones were thrown into sharp relief, and she looked disconcertingly like the portrait of Acheron Malfoy in Draco's room.

"Well, we got some other colors too, for when I'm not in class. And look at all these books!" she said gloatingly. "I wonder if I can read them all before school starts in a month. And I'm to have a cat—Miss Precipa promised me her grey kitten. Can you imagine a school that lets you bring an animal? And look, dragonhide gloves. _Dragonhide!_ Isn't it weird? But here's the best thing, Mummy." She unwrapped her piece of velvet and revealed her new wand. "Apparently, Professor Dumbledore had Mr. Ollivander make it specially for me. It works beautifully, like it knows inside my head."

"It's beautiful," Dita said, a little doubtfully. Even after all these years, she still didn't understand all this fully, how you could take a stick and make it do things. She reached out a finger and touched it, and it just felt like wood, none of the odd sensations her daughter described when she talked about holly.

"And, Mummy—it's kind of a sister wand to Draco's wand. Young Ollivander didn't really understand why, but it seemed to be significant. He—he called me Lucia Malfoy. And—and people _looked_ at me, and I heard somebody say, 'Those traitor Malfoys ought to be banned from Hogwarts. Ought to have their wands broken, the whole lot of them.'"

"Is that why only some of it was a good time?" Dita asked gently.

Lucia's sharp chin didn't quite wobble as she nodded. "Is _everyone_ going to be like that? Including the other students at Hogwarts? And what about the teachers? Are they all going to just assume I'm as bad as the Malfoys?"

"Not all of them, but you may expect quite a few of them to do so. Especially people who had been particularly close to Harry Potter and his friends. They won't understand, at first. You're going to simply have to deal with unfriendliness for a while. Eventually they'll come to see you for who you really are, after they've lived with you, but it'll take time. You will have to demonstrate your good intentions and not respond to malice with malice. Don't try to _not_ be a Malfoy; just be who you naturally are, a Bonnefoy."

"And what is a Bonnefoy, exactly?" Tears trembled on Lucia's lashes. "I'm the only one in existence, since you just made me up between your name and Lucius'."

"A Bonnefoy is intelligent and compassionate, a strong person who knows what is right and can lead others toward it."

"How do you know?"

"Because I've watched the only Bonnefoy in existence grow up, silly. I have excellent powers of observation."

Lucia laughed a little shakily. "So you do. You may thank your great-grandfather for that. Speaking of which, why are you playing with the Dancing Men?"

"Not I. Your brother. This is his diary."

"_Draco_ used the Dancing Men for a diary? That's so…odd."

"It seems everything is odd and coincidental suddenly. I was just about to begin translating. Do you want to help?"

"Of course!"

"Go get your 'Adventure of the Dancing Men,' then."

As Lucia started for her room for the book, she stopped suddenly and turned back. "Mum, I think I know which House I want to be in."

* * *

**Author's note: If you wish to see an example of the Dancing Men, or read "The Adventure of the Dancing Men," go here: http:/en . wikisource . org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Dancing_Men **

**(You'll have to take out the extra spaces between the periods in the address. FF . net doesn't like links, for some reason.)**


	6. First Year

**First Year, or**

**Not So Much To Me Is Yonder Lane**

**Chapter 6**

Dita sat on the train for Dover, perusing Draco's diary. She and Lucia had made it through the first several years in the last couple of weeks. (Narcissa had been furious that she wasn't immediately rushing off to do a great deal of running about and actively searching, but she had convinced her that she would be more effective learning about him and following him psychologically than just rushing out randomly.) As she had expected, the early years of the diary followed the Dancing Men cipher exactly with few innovations, and the writing/drawing was clumsy, the entries few and short. Later the handwriting became more fluid, the figures looking more like writing than drawing, and the entries were longer, though still not frequent until the last two years. Over time as well, the cipher became increasingly sophisticated and more difficult to figure out, less a one-to-one relationship between figures and letters and more of a shorthand, with some figures standing for complete sounds or even words. Occasionally an entirely new figure would appear, the replacement for a whole word that she would have to figure out from context; it was usually a new word, perhaps recently learned, of some significance.

It was no wonder at all that Draco Malfoy had turned to secret codes and journal-writing as a sort of outlet. The boy had an impossible life. His mother indulged him, but his father was harsh and demanded perfection. On the one hand he had an unhealthy sense of entitlement and superiority; on the other hand, a sense of uncertainty and even insecurity underlay everything he wrote. Dita had noted that the two often went together. When you had to constantly prove how much better you were than everyone else, you lived with a constant fear of failure. In Draco's case, failure meant failing his entire bloodline as well as dealing with his father's displeasure and, later, facing the cruel displeasure of the world's greatest and most fearsome wizard.

At the beginning, the entries were those of a petulant child, complaining about having to go to Hogwarts instead of something called Durmstrang. (_Durmstrang?_ Dita wondered. _Anything to do with that literary and musical movement, _Strurm Und Drang,_ from the 18th Century?)_ It was the petulance of a spoilt child who, spoiling notwithstanding, did not dare to complain publically. There were complaints about a fellow student, a young Harry Potter, who thought he was better than everyone else (_The pot calling the kettle black,_ Dita thought, amused) and who, apparently, reading between the lines, was a threat to Draco's self-importance. _Draco_ was supposed to be the centre of attention at his school, not a part-Muggle, accidental hero who knew nothing about the wizarding world and cared nothing for Malfoy preeminence. Draco had, kindly, offered the young boy a place in _his_ world, a chance to be with the best people and occupy a high society that would have normally been closed to him, and the ungrateful Potter refused. That made Draco very angry, but it also made him a little uneasy, wondering what his father would say about his inability to cultivate the acquaintance of one of the most famous young wizards of all time. But of course it was all Potter's fault that the Malfoys had gone through their time of trouble eleven years ago, when the Dark Lord disappeared.

After that, Potter became the scapegoat for all Draco's troubles at school. No matter what went wrong, Draco had someone else to blame it on, deflecting attention away from his own shortcomings, which he was hypersensitive about. And no wonder, when he had such appallingly idiotic parents, Dita thought, teaching him to hide from his failings and inflate his own ego. At what point did you stop blaming the parents for teaching their child to follow evil and start holding the child accountable for his own choices?

When Potter was chosen to be the youngest Seeker ever on a Hogwarts Quidditch team (_What was that?_ Dita wondered) and Draco received his father's unreasonable ire for not receiving a similar (and entirely unlikely) honor, it was all Potter's fault. When he had detention because he snuck out after curfew (expecting to get a reward, of all things, for catching Potter doing the same thing), he blamed it on Potter. When he was forced for his detention to go into the Forbidden Forest and encountered horrors past his young imagination which had him fleeing in sobbing terror, he recounted it angrily and shamefully in his journal and managed somehow to make Potter and a big man named Hagrid seem responsible. Even as a child he had a way with words, and sometimes Dita caught herself actually believing him, caught up in a fleeting sense of the world being against him.

* * *

**Author's note: "'Sturm Und Drang' is the name of a movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s, in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements." (http:/en . wikipedia . org/wiki/Sturm_und_Drang)**

**Sounds like something a place like Durmstrang would espouse, doesn't it?**


	7. The Hogwarts Express

**The Hogwarts Express, or**

**The Holly Is Dark When the Rose-Briar Blooms**

**Chapter 7**

Lucia sat in a compartment by herself on the Hogwarts Express, hardly believing she really was there. In the last four years, she had almost thought of the whole wizarding world as something fictional, out of a book, as indeed her main exposure to it had been through the many books Miss Precipa got for her. Even in the last month, since the owl came from Professor McGonagall, it had all been a bit like a dream. There was her mother, sometimes rushing about to get ready for a chase across Europe after the rather nasty character who was Lucia's half-brother and sometimes hunched up over a coded journal that was like something out of her own history, unexpectedly spouting translations at Lucia or getting her to take a stab at a tricky passage. There was Miss Precipa rushing about getting her all kinds of assorted and peculiar things she ought to have at school. There was Lucia herself rushing about visiting all her school friends to tell them a long-lost relative had decided to send her to a rather eccentric sixth-form college in the wilds of Yorkshire and she expected it to be wildly fun, as well as trying to memorize all her textbooks and get her wand to work properly for her. From the class list she had been sent, it seemed she was to be with all the First Years in such classes as Transfigurations, Charms, and Potions and with Fifth and Sixth Years in classes like History of Magic and Astronomy. Miss Precipa had told her to expect to be ahead of most students in general knowledge and behind them in practical application.

Dita had left for the Continent two weeks ago. That was not unusual. She had tracked people all over the world, doing exactly what she was doing now: studying them and their personal circumstances and, somehow, managing to get inside their heads so well that she knew where they were likely to show up. Lucia had stayed at home those two weeks, with Miss Precipa, who lived less than a mile away, as a frequent visitor, almost more frantic than Lucia herself about cramming all kinds of useful information into her pupil's head. Lucia's mother had contacted her several times to tell her new things she had discovered about Draco from new parts of his journal, so now her head was a whirl of academic facts, excitement for school, and concern for the brother she had never met. She had known about him for four years, and in that time she had often been curious about him, repulsed by him, and sorry for him in an odd sort of way, as well as deeply worried over the last couple of years while his world was going through seismic fluctuations with him nearly at the very centre, but she had never known him, what he was really like outside of the tales of his family's greatness and perfidy. She supposed no one did. On the outside he carried himself with confidence and arrogance, while inside he was just as much a maze of contradictions and fears as any other teenager. They were probably going to hate her at Hogwarts. She had him to thank for that. But she put her chin up stubbornly. It wasn't going to scare her away. It only made her more determined to prove who she really was. She had enough strong, obstinate Malfoy in her for that. Or maybe it came from her mother's great-grandfather, who certainly bore slight resemblance to the Malfoys in some ways. She almost giggled at that, and the kitten in her lap stirred and nipped at her finger with her sharp little teeth.

"Victoria! Don't do that."

"Would you like a treat, dear?"

Lucia jumped a little, not having noticed the large food trolley outside her compartment door, and the cat nipped at her again. "Well, I almost did name you Tantomile, didn't I, Victoria, though you're not a twin?"

"Excuse me, dear?" the elderly lady at the trolley asked, confused.

"Sorry. I was talking to my cat. She told me you were here, but I wasn't paying attention."

"I haven't seen you on this train before," she said uncertainly, taking in Lucia's sharp, pale face and her soft, pale clothes, as well as the silver-grey and white kitten in her hands.

"For good reason. I haven't been on this train before."

"Oh. Would you like a pumpkin pasty or a Cauldron Cake?"

Pumpkin pasties sounded nasty to Lucia, but she politely did not say so. She got up and looked over the piles of sweets and other things to eat. "I'd like to try a Chocolate Frog, I think. And what's this?" She picked up a bottle of clear liquid with a picture of a floppy, pointed hat tipping up a similar bottle into its mouth (how could a hat have a mouth?), with the same picture on _that_ bottle and so on ad nauseum, and words that said "Weasleys' Sorting Bottle. Predict your future!"

"Oh, that's a great favorite, but I shouldn't drink it just now, dear. If you try it after the Sorting Ceremony, it will turn your hair your House colours, but if you try it before the Ceremony, it's likely to turn your hair the colour of the House you most don't want to get into. Older brothers tend to give it to their First Year siblings and tell them it will help them know ahead of time what House they will get into. Of course chaos ensues." She shook her head with a fond smile. "Those Weasley twins. The trouble they caused me!" She shook it again, the smile fading. "Dear, dear."

"I'll take two bottles," Lucia said firmly. "But I'll save it until later. Thank you."

When the trolley lady had gone, she put the bottles next to her on the seat and applied herself to the chocolate frogs. The first one startled her by leaping out of its packaging. It would have been lost, but Victoria leapt after it and, after a brief wrestle, subdued it. Lucia laughed at the tiny grey and white cat pouncing on the chocolate, but she took the frog away from her.

"Sorry, dear. Chocolate isn't good for cats."

Victoria gave her a look from pale blue eyes that said she hadn't wanted to eat it anyway. Lucia turned her attention to the five-sided card inside the package. Professor Dumbledore was smiling at her from it.

"Hello, Professor," she whispered, a little sadly. "I wish you hadn't died before I could ever meet you. You were so kind to me."

He gave her a gentle smile, his blue eyes twinkling, and turned and walked away with a little wave. Victoria leapt at her and nipped her ankle.

"We're really going to have to work out a different arrangement, Victoria," Lucia said, bending and picking her up. "Hello."

The girl in the doorway hadn't even been aware she'd been noticed. She was a tall girl, a year or two older than Lucia, and she had a strong, character-filled beauty, a face with decisive bones, swift dark green eyes, straight dark brown hair reaching her shoulders and swept back from her face. She wore black robes like the ones Miss Precipa had had Lucia buy, but hers had a silver and green badge on the left breast, a silver P against a green background, surmounted by silver and green heraldry-like designs—Lucia's sharp eyes made out a snake amongst them. The girl stood looking at her.

"They told me a Malfoy had come aboard the train, but I didn't believe them. I didn't think they would allow Malfoys back at Hogwarts, or that they would come if they did."

"I don't know if they would or not. My name is Lucia Bonnefoy."

"_Lucia_ Bonnefoy? You can't tell me you're not a Malfoy. Great Salazar, you look just like Draco! Cousin?"

"Brother."

"Nonsense. Draco never had a sister."

"He had, but he never knew it. I'm his half-sister. Lucius Malfoy is my father."

The girl crossed her arms and leaned against the door post. "Then you _are_ a Malfoy."

"I prefer to think of myself as a Bonnefoy."

"Bonnefoy? What kind of a name is that?"

"It's a combination of Malfoy and my mother's name, Bonhomme. The best parts of both. Who are you?"

The girl came and sat down opposite her. "Astoria Greengrass. I'm a Slytherin Prefect. Sixth year." She cast Lucia a narrow look. "You should know I fought against You-Know-Who and the Death Eaters at the Battle of Hogwarts."

"Did you? That's good to know. I would have too, if I'd been there. As it is, I had nothing to do with the whole thing. My mother is a Muggle."

Astoria's red lips opened. "I don't believe you. _Lucius Malfoy_ and a _Muggle?"_

"Difficult to believe, isn't it, given how bigoted Lucius is? But even he was young and reckless once."

Astoria blinked once or twice. "You really _aren't_ a Malfoy, are you?"

"Not really."

"I don't suppose you'll be in Slytherin, then."

Lucia wasn't sure whether Astoria was glad or disappointed. "I don't know."

"If you're actually _against_ your relatives, you'll probably be in Gryffindor." She sounded disgusted.

"I hope not."

Astoria's eyebrows went up. "Really? _Everyone_ wants to be in Gryffindor, since the great Harry Potter was there, even little First Years who clearly belong in Slytherin. Seems Slytherin is no longer the path to greatness; Gryffindor is."

"A logical development, since so many heroes of the Wars were from Gryffindor and so many Death Eaters were from Slytherin. But I'm not Gryffindor material. I'm not brave and action-oriented and hearty."

Suddenly Astoria laughed. "You talk like a Ravenclaw! So _intelligent_ about everything. Not like Gryffindors, who let their emotions run away with them."

"So do Slytherins, if Draco is any indication."

Astoria shrugged. "He always was rather emotional, wasn't he?" Suddenly she leaned forward and lowered her voice. "How is Draco doing?"

Images of Dancing Men flashed through Lucia's mind, and images of burnt photographs and a book with a sword driven through it. "You probably know better than I do. I've never met him."

Her interrogator slowly leaned back. "Never met your own brother?"

"My mother—my _Muggle_ mother—thought it best to keep me away from Lucius. That's why I'm fifteen and have never been to Hogwarts. But you were friends with Draco, weren't you?"

To her surprise, Astoria flushed a little. "He never knew I existed, really. He was friends with my older sister Daphne, but I was two years younger and too stubborn to be 'useful,' hence invisible."

"Oh. I see."

Astoria flushed again. "Don't make something out of it. I would have fought him in the Battle, if I'd had to."

"Don't worry. I won't tell anyone." And to prove it, she changed the subject. "It must have been awful, being in the Battle of Hogwarts."

"It was horrible—and rather glorious." She flushed yet again and got up quickly. "I need to go to the Prefects' coach. You'd better change. We're almost there."

* * *

**Author's note: Victoria and Tantomile are two cats from the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical "Cats." Victoria is a graceful, elegant white and grey kitten, and Tantomile, a twin to Coricopat, always knows when someone is near.**


	8. Of Fred and Tonks

**Of Fred and Tonks, or**

**And Who Will Call the Wild-Briar Fair?**

**Chapter 8**

Lucia stood on her seat to drag down her smallish bag from the rack over her head. When she turned back around to hop down to the floor, she gave a sharp exclamation of surprise. Another girl was sitting in the seat Astoria had vacated, playing with Victoria. This girl was short and had a round face, dishwater-blond hair just barely shorter than Lucia's, and luminous, silvery eyes; she wore an odd, sparkly, pink robe.

"Traitor," Lucia said to the cat, who was playing madly with some bright, feathery thing the girl was dangling over her.

"She likes my borogrove-feather necklace," the girl said serenely.

"Borogrove? As in mimsy borogrove?"

"Oh, no. This one wasn't from a mimsy borogrove. My father's friend's brother-in-law would never have been able to get it for me if it was mimsy. They always hide exceedingly well at that time of the year."

"But borogroves don't actually exist, do they? They're from a nonsense poem."

"And who wrote that poem? A Muggle who had a friend named Alice—who was not a Muggle. She used to tell him stories, which he wrote down and made famous among Muggles."

"_What?_ I thought _he_ told _her_ the stories."

"Oh, no."

"Then the rabbit—"

"An Animagus. He'd been trapped in rabbit form by the dark witch who called herself Regina Cruenta."

"Regina Cruenta," Lucia repeated, translating in her mind. "'The Blood-Red Queen'?"

The girl smiled dreamily. "Yes. She had the potential to be very bad indeed, but Alice helped defeat her."

"With a flamingo and a pack of cards, I suppose."

"Yes, exactly. You can read all about it in _Muggle Tales With Magical Foundations,_ by the Grimm Sisters."

"Who are you?" Lucia asked as she had asked Astoria, wondering if non-Muggles ever introduced themselves properly.

"Luna Lovegood. I came to look at you, because they say you're Draco Malfoy's doppelgänger—kind of his soul in a girl's body."

"That's ridiculous."

"Oh, I know. I knew that the first moment I looked at you. Draco's doppelgänger couldn't possibly have eyes like yours."

"Thank you, I think."

"Can I have some of that?" She gestured at the bottles by Lucia's side.

"Er—" She gave her one. At least she'd find out what House the strange girl was in. Hufflepuff, probably.

Luna uncorked the bottle and sniffed it. Then, instead of drinking it, she pointed her wand at the window. "_Revibro!"_ Before Lucia's eyes, the window turned into a mirror. Luna lifted the bottle in a kind of salute. "To Fred. And Tonks."

Fred Lucia understood. Who was Tonks? Luna was watching her reflection and sipping delicately, and her hair was turning a very pale and delicate shade of blue. Lucia hadn't quite expected Ravenclaw, but the girl did seem to have a great deal of knowledge about strange things.

"That'll do." She pushed the cork back into the bottle and gave it back to Lucia. "Thank you. I needed something to match my Hogwarts robes."

"But you're wearing pink."

Luna looked down at herself. "Oh." She tapped her shoulder with her wand, and her robes rippled into black. Now there was a badge on the left, like Astoria's, except blue, with an eagle instead of a snake.

"You're a Prefect!" She wanted to take back her stupid statement of the obvious the moment she'd said it, but Luna only nodded and examined her faintly blue hair again.

"You know, Tonks really had the right idea. Aren't you going to put yours on?"

"Blue hair?"

"Your robes. Though you'd look very nice with blue hair. Maybe after the Sorting?"

"Maybe." She struggled into her robes. "I've never liked black. It makes me look so _peculiar."_

"It makes you look like Draco. But no one could ever mistake you."

"Obviously, as I'm a girl."

"No, I mean you're so different no one could ever think you were like him. Your whole air is different." Luna smiled at her. "We're here. Bye. I hope you're in Ravenclaw."

As she was fading through the door, Lucia called after her, "I say, your hair looks marvelous!"

Luna smiled back at her. "Tonks would have approved, don't you think?"

She was gone before Lucia could ask who Tonks was.

* * *

**Author's Note: For borogroves, mimsy or otherwise, see _Alice__ In Wonderland._**


	9. Muggle Studies

**Muggle Studies, or**

**Where He So Longs To Tread**

**Chapter 9**

Vienna had been a complete washout, as had Amsterdam and Berlin. To tell the truth, Dita had not actually expected to find Draco in any of those cities, but she still had to be thorough.

His journal told how every summer the Malfoys would go to Europe, spending each month in a different city, meeting all the "best" pure-bloods and, incidentally, sounding them out for possible Death-Eater allies. Draco had often been bored; Dita wondered if it was because he never allowed himself to actually make friends of any of the children his age. He expected them to be his followers, and even the ones who were well-connected enough to be equals were held at arm's length. They could be allies and teammates, perhaps, but never _friends,_ not what Dita considered friends. Draco never bothered to hide that everyone at Hogwarts was beneath him. Crabbe and Goyle, the two boys he had known all his life, were his serfs; Pansy Parkinson, Daphne Greengrass, Blaise Zabini, and others were his courtiers. In Europe he didn't have time to form his coterie, and after a while even a boy trained to think of himself as a kind of prince would grow tired of stilted society parties and secret meetings where nothing was discussed but politics.

In Rome and Venice, however, before his fourth year at Hogwarts, he had discovered the joys of disappearing to do his own exploration into Italian wizarding life—and Italian Muggle life. He betrayed in his diary an odd fascination with the ways Muggles managed to get on in life without magic, though he was terrified both of ending up like someone called Arthur Weasley, for whom he had a great deal of scorn, and of his father's wrath, should he ever find out. (Dita wondered what he would say if he found out about his father's own, short-lived fascination with Muggles…)

At school he fled from his own dangerous activities by becoming colder and more disdainful of Muggles than ever. Now, though, Dita believed those two cities would have been among the first places he would go in an attempt to regain any happiness he had had as a boy. To Rome and Venice she would go.

She supposed Lucia had gotten to Hogwarts by now. She ought to receive either an owl or a phone call in the next few days telling her which House her daughter had been sorted into.


	10. Sorting

**Sorting, or**

**To Do Poor Sinners Good**

**Chapter 10**

Hogwarts was the most wonderful place Lucia had ever seen. Of course she knew all about it, about the ghosts and the moving staircases and the paintings that made you give passwords, about the Whomping Willow and the bewitched ceiling in the Great Hall and the different House common rooms. _Hogwarts, A History_ and Miss Precipa had seen to that. But of course it was different actually being here.

She was glad that the grandeur of the castle was distracting the First Years' attention from her. When they had all gotten off the train and she had been herded with the youngest students toward the boats for the ride across the lake (with the huge man named Hagrid, whom of course she'd heard of), they had all stared at her and huddled away from her. By now everyone on the train had probably heard who she was. She wondered, rather sadly, how many of them had parents hurt or even killed by _her_ father. They were so small, these ten- and eleven-year olds, and most of them had probably been involved in the War far more than she had. She tried to smile at them, but it felt false.

But they quickly forgot about her when they saw the castle, and now they were too busy worrying about the Sorting to worry about her. She couldn't help worrying about it herself. What if the Hat didn't put her in the right House? Why was it left up to a Hat, anyway?  
The great doors opened, and they all began the long walk down the middle of the Hall, between long tables. Everyone cheered for them, but she saw people near her give her glances from wide and frightened eyes. She put her hand in her pocket and stroked Victoria's soft little head. The kitten paid no attention, going right on sleeping.

At the front of the Hall was the High Table, and there were all the teachers she had always heard of and never seen. There was the little old ghost, Professor Binns, and the half-goblin Professor Flitwick, the spiky-haired Madame Hooch and the rather vague-looking Professor Trelawney, the wild-looking Hagrid and the precise-looking Professor Sinistra, among others. And in the middle was Professor McGonagall, tall, thin, looking tired and old but nonetheless stern and upright. She was welcoming them all in her slightly creaky, precise Scottish voice, drawing their attention to the Sorting Hat—but all the attention was on it anyway.

So odd a thing to hold your future in its—not _hands._ Brim, maybe. What if it didn't believe her? She knew where she ought to be, but what if it had other ideas about the best place for a Malfoy descendant? After all, what were a fifteen-year old's ideas next to the expertise of a hundreds-of-years-old…_Hat?_

The first child (Adams, Leona) was sorted to Gryffindor and, dazed-looking, received much tumultuous applause. Never had Gryffindor been so popular. The second child (Backus, Barclay) was sorted to Hufflepuff and looked slightly disappointed, but the Hufflepuffs were no less cordial in their welcome. And then, unexpectedly, it was her name called out by Professor McGonagall.

"Bonnefoy, Lucia!"

The entire Great Hall became deadly quiet. The students at the front stared at her; the ones at the back craned to see if it really was true, that Draco Malfoy's doppelgänger had come to haunt Hogwarts. Even the professors stared, and she caught a couple of them giving Professor McGonagall uncertain looks, as if they couldn't believe she had allowed this particular student in or were expecting her to discover a mistake suddenly. But instead Lucia sat on the stool, clutching her cold hands together, and the hat was placed on her head.

_Oh, interesting,_ said a voice in her ear—in her head, really. _Another Malfoy. Haven't had one of these in years._

"Bonnefoy," Lucia murmured.

Bonnefoy,_ is it? "Good-faith." That's an interesting name for a child of Lucius Malfoy. I remember him. It would serve him right if you went into Hufflepuff, wouldn't it? Give everyone quite a shock._

"Yes, it would."

_And you'd do well there, too. You'd be a leader. What do you say to that?_

Lucia said nothing.

_Well, I agree with you. Not Hufflepuff. You could go anywhere, really. How about Gryffindor?_

"I'm not brave enough for Gryffindor."

_Oho, aren't you? Shall we try it and see?_

"No."

_Mind of your own. That's the Ravenclaw in you. You'll do admirably in Ravenclaw. Help bring it out of obscurity. That's what you want, isn't it? To make your House prosper? Ravenclaw will prosper under you, your brains, your ideas. So, let's make it—_

"Slytherin, please."

_Slytherin…_ the voice purred in her head._ That's a pretty place for a girl who insists on being called "Light of Good Faith" instead of her family name. I thought you claimed to be not like the Malfoys._

"I'm not. That's why I want to go there."

_Oho, you're a deep one. Slytherins are deep, it's true. But what about that famous Slytherin ambition? You don't want to take over the world._

"You can be ambitious without wanting to take over the world. Anyway, you said it yourself. I want to make my House great. _Truly_ great, not just powerful. Isn't that ambition enough for you?"

_That is ambition indeed,_ the Hat said, sounding slightly reluctant. _You want control over these little children's minds._

"Not control. Influence. Like Professor Dumbledore had. Especially for those children—like my brother—who have nothing but bad influences in their lives. How can they choose good if they're never shown it? And no one good seems to want into Slytherin these days. That's how it went so bad: all the good influences got put into brave, noble Gryffindor, kind, good Hufflepuff, and smart, wise Ravenclaw. So what was left to Slytherin? Nothing but bad apples."

_Little Bonnefoy, you make a convincing argument. Are you sure? Because life will be much easier in Ravenclaw._

"My life has always been easy. Unfairly easy. I don't need it to be easy."

After a moment of silence, the hat said, _Dumbledore was right about you._

"About me? About what?"

_Not my place to tell._

"Then don't taunt me."

_Ooh, snappish, just like a Slytherin._

"How's this for ambition? Some day I'm going to be Headmistress of Hogwarts."

The Hat snickered in her ear. _Fine. Have it your way, little—_"SLYTHERIN!"it bellowed aloud, making her jump and making Victoria in her pocket wake up and give a warning scratch at her leg. Only then did she realize how long she'd been sitting on the stool. Had there ever been such a long deliberation before?

There was no applause when she got down, as there had been for the others. Professor McGonagall was looking stunned, even displeased. She gave Lucia one sharp look out of green eyes and then, deliberately, began clapping. The Great Hall slowly followed her lead, and Lucia walked over to the strangely sparse Slytherin table, where the few students there looked like they didn't know if they were glad she was there or not.


	11. After the War

**After the War, or**

**When There's Been a Shower of Rain**

**Chapter 11**

The banquet was nearly over, the most delicious banquet Lucia had ever gone to. Professor McGonagall rose, impressively.

"I would like to say a few words to all of you now that you are no longer in danger of starving to death, and not the sort of nonsense words Professor Dumbledore used to delight in. There is much more to be said on this occasion.

"After what took place here last spring, some people thought that we ought not to open Hogwarts again for a year or so, to give both the castle and the people time to recover, but we all believe that what this school needs most is its students. We all need normalcy again. Over the summer much has been done to repair what was damaged, and repairs will be ongoing.

"Many changes will be taking place this term. We need normalcy, but we also need changes that will acknowledge what we have all gone through. You will notice that there are very few Sixth- and Seventh-Year students here. This is because they have all been given the option to graduate early, without taking their N.E.W.T.s." A murmur of astonishment arose, and she held up her hand. "The part that the students of this school played in the recent War has more than served for a final exam, don't you think? Some few have elected to return because they value scholarship, and we are pleased to have their maturity and wisdom. Other students who were expelled or otherwise missed their last year for reasons relating to the War have been granted honorary N.E.W.T. passes. These students include but are not limited to Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ronald Weasley, Justin Finch-Fletchley, and George and Fred Weasley." The silence in the Hall was palpable, broken only by a few sniffles.

Professor McGonagall's voice was softer than Lucia had expected was possible. "We have suffered a number of casualties among our members. Among the professors we have lost Albus Dumbledore, Severus Snape, Remus Lupin, and Alastor Moody. Among the students we have lost Fred Weasley, Colin Creavy, Nicholas Aberforth, Viola Maudman, Eve Pommel, Natalie Anastas, and of course Cedric Diggory three years ago. And it would be remiss of me to neglect to mention Hogwarts' support staff who gave up their lives, the faithful house elf Dobby and a number of his friends who work here. They have all been honored posthumously, and you will see new paintings of them outside their Houses.

"We have suffered another loss, as you can see by observing the Slytherin table." Everyone turned to stare, and some of the Slytherins put their heads down, ducking away from the eyes, while others put their chins up proudly. "It is well known that a significant number of Slytherins chose to follow Lord Voldemort." (There were some gasps as she pronounced the name firmly.) "They have not returned. But you see a number of Slytherin students who have elected to return to Hogwarts. Many of these students fought the Death Eaters in the battles, and many of their parents did. I will not have you judging them by what their fellow students have done. We count Slytherins among our heroes as surely as we count Gryffindors. That is why it is a new rule that discrimination will be grounds for expulsion, no matter who you are.

"This leads me to the biggest change of this year. There will no longer be a House Cup."

A gasp and a veritable babble of protest arose. She held up her hand again.

"I knew this would not be a popular decision, but it is a necessary one. The House Cup has been tradition for so long that we have been unable to see the rivalry it created between the Houses. Our greatest asset, our _unity,_ was greatly compromised because of this. We have created rifts by pitting you students against each other when we ought to have been strengthened by our differences. Therefore, instead of competitions based on who is _better_, we will have competitions based on contributions to the success and unity of the school as a whole. You will still have your fun and your celebrations, but the emphasis will be different. Your Heads of House will give you more complete information later.

"Another change is this: each student in the first three years will be assigned a mentor, an older student from the fourth, fifth, and sixth years. The Seventh Years are excused from this because of their heavy workload, unless they particularly wish to take part. These mentors will be assigned across Houses; no student will have a mentor from his or her own House. You will spend four hours a week together. The mentors will help the younger students get to know the castle and learn to fly and will perform tutoring in the subjects that are their specialties. This mentoring idea was Professor Dumbledore's, as was the desire to stop the House Cup competitions. He believed it would promote unity. For this year it is an experiment, but we believe it will be a success. The Sorting Hat will choose the pairings, and you will all be informed of the results tomorrow.

"Now we come to the changes in professors and classes. You know we have not had great success with our Defense Against the Dark Arts professors. In the last seven years, the two most successful have been a werewolf and a student. You may wonder why such a class is even necessary now that Lord Voldemort is really and truly gone, but evil never sleeps, students. We all hope and believe that we have moved into an era of peace, but the truth is that there is always evil to be fought, in our own hearts and out in the world. With that in mind, I myself will taking the Defense Against the Dark Arts classes, with some assistance from my fellow professors. We will frequently have guest teachers, and these will not only be from among the adult population but will also include your fellow students who have proven themselves in battle.

"Of course you know that we are missing our Potions Master. I would like you all to welcome your new Potions Master, a wizard many of you have heard of, Professor Regulus Moonshine."

There was polite applause as the tall, trim, black-haired wizard in dark purple and silver robes rose and bowed. The Ravenclaws were the most enthusiastic applauders, but Lucia, who recognized him as the very innovative man who had become famous for his potions to help hags resist their need for human flesh, was among them. She was going to look forward to his class, she thought. She would have dreaded it under Severus Snape.

"In addition, we have a new Muggle Studies professor. Muggle Studies are going to be more strongly emphasized from now on, and Professor Phoebus Penrose is among their foremost proponents. Please welcome him."

The Hufflepuffs applauded one of their own joyously, and the stout, gentle-looking man bowed to them.

"You will notice that Professor Horace Slughorn is no longer among us. He told me he was going to truly retire this time and become a hermit. As we all know, that means that at any time he is going to show up at a Ministry party or as the official sponsor of a big Quidditch match." She joined in the general chuckle. "But of course that means that Slytherin is again without a Head of House. Therefore, I have appointed Professor Aurora Sinistra to be the Slytherin Head."

Everyone appeared to be somewhat surprised at the appointment of the tall, dark, serene Professor of Astronomy who gave a grave bow. Lucia decided she liked the woman's way of looking out of her eyes, though, and the quietness with which she held herself. Slytherin would be much different under her than it had been when Draco was in it.

"And finally, I am pleased to announce that Professor Pomona Sprout has been appointed as my Deputy Headmistress. As your Headmistress, I will be an excellent administrator, but Professor Sprout will more ably fill the much-needed role of mediator and leavener. She is beloved by many of you, and you are beloved by her. Please congratulate her."

The applause was again surprised, but everyone seemed pleased. The round, smiling woman seemed to be a popular teacher.

"That is all I have to say today, and I think you'll agree it is quite enough. We will have a good and hopefully quiet year, which we all need. Please continue your feasting. Prefects and Heads of House, I wish to see you in my office after the banquet."


	12. The Expertise of a Hat

**The Expertise of a Hat, or**

**Where I Go Every Day**

**Chapter 12**

Professor McGonagall left the banquet a bit early and went up to her office. No longer Dumbledore's office, no longer even looking like Dumbledore's idiosyncratic space but entirely her own brand of wild Scottish severity, but it was still difficult to believe it as her own office. The Sorting Hat had been brought back up, and she sat down and clapped it on her head.

_Little Minerva McGonagall…_

"What did I tell you earlier?" she snapped.

_Well, now, little Minerva—_

"Oh, stop it! I told you, no more shunting Death Eater relatives or otherwise 'bad' students into Slytherin! The little Malfoy girl was supposed to be in Ravenclaw!"

_Bonnefoy._

"What?"

_Her name is Bonnefoy. It appears that little Minerva McGonagall still hasn't learned that she can't control everything._

"What are you talking about?"

_I tried, little Minerva. I offered them all—Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw. She didn't want them._ Chose_ Slytherin, she did, just like you chose Gryffindor. Sometimes the choice is more important than the natural talents. Not always, but sometimes._

After a moment of silence, Professor McGonagall said, "Did Albus know?"

The Hat said snidely, _That's not for me to tell._

"He believed she had a task to perform here. Like Harry. Only not so grand."

_Or traumatic?_

"I imagine living in Slytherin will be quite traumatic enough for any normal child," she said acerbically.

The Hat snickered. _Depends on your definition of _normal,_ dunnit?_

"Alright, enough out of you. I need the list of mentoring pairs."

She was still writing down the last ones, wearing the Sorting Hat, when the three other Heads of House, the eight Prefects, and the Deputy Headmistress arrived. Calmly she removed the Hat before their curious eyes and replaced it with her own. It looked to be a little crowded, but there was a genius about the Headmaster's office that no matter how many people it held, there were always enough places to sit.

"I have asked you to meet with me so we can go over a few of the new guidelines. I want to especially address the issue of Slytherin. It is time for a complete change in that House, and it looks like we now have the perfect opportunity. The Death Eater sympathisers are all gone, and the students who are left are young enough to be trained out of any bad habits and attitudes. We have a new Head and new Prefects," she nodded at them, "all of whom have shown the goodness and strength Slytherins are capable of. I will not deceive you into believing that it is going to be easy. You have years of history to oppose, as well as the current perceptions. People are afraid of Slytherin. Miss Greengrass, Mr. Pritchard, you must lead your House in proving the perceptions to be false. Professor Sinistra, I chose you as Head of Slytherin because you are known as a Slytherin who is wise, self-controlled, and gentle, each of which is a great strength that can be drawn out of your House.

"Now, I wish to address the one issue that I know you are all thinking of. Miss Lucia Bonnefoy."

They all stirred a little and nodded, relieved she'd brought the subject up.

"The rumours you have probably heard are true. She is Lucius Malfoy's daughter, Draco's sister."

They all stirred again, and whispered. Graham Pritchard, the male Slytherin prefect, went a little pale. He had suffered under Draco's rule in Slytherin. Only Astoria Greengrass kept looking at her, unblinking.

"Her mother is a Muggle, and she has been raised as a Muggle. She has never met her father or her brother, and Professor Dumbledore believed her character to be quite different to theirs. He helped her mother protect her from her father's attention—it is quite possible that Lucius has forgotten she ever existed. He would not want to acknowledge a half-Muggle child. This has been to her benefit. She has had a private tutor, so she is not entirely ignorant, but she will be behind most of the others in the Fourth Year.

"I am telling you this so that you will not treat her like a Malfoy. You needn't coddle her, but you also must not accept any prejudice from your students. She is to be treated in every way like any other student. There will be no more petty and dangerous rivalries such as developed between Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. I expect my students to control themselves. For a year or two, we must run a tight ship, as the Muggles say. I expect you all to contribute. Understood?"

Nods all around, and she unbent a little and smiled at them.

"Good. Now, here are the lists of mentoring pairs. Pomona, we are one student off, so the sorting hat suggested you ask your one Seventh-Year student to mentor my remaining Third Year…."


	13. Slytherin

**Slytherin, or**

**Of All the Trees That Are In The Wood**

**Chapter 13**

After the rather excessively long meeting (Professor McGonagall was prone to long meetings so she could explain in detail her many guidelines, policies, and rules), Astoria and Graham returned sleepily to their grand dungeon common room.

"Do you suppose they're right, about that girl not being like Draco?" Graham asked.

"I expect so," Astoria replied absently. "After all, I'm not much like _my_ sister, now, am I?"

"Not much," he said admiringly. "I was always impressed by the way you stood up to Draco. Wish I could have done that."

"Oh, dry up. You're a Slytherin!" she said sharply. "Start acting like it! Draco's gone, and _you're_ Prefect now."

"You know they only reason they made _me_ Prefect is because I'm the only male Sixth Year Slytherin left. What does acting like a Slytherin mean anymore, anyway?"

"That's for us to decide, isn't it? There's no more Draco and Blaise to push you around, no more Daphne and Pansy to push _me_ around. We're _it."_

In truth, if it hadn't been for Daphne, she would have had Pansy and Draco on her case far more than she did. Daphne used to say things like, "Leave the kid alone, will you? She's not worth it," and Astoria would know that her sister was trying to protect her, in her own strange way. Though sometimes she'd despised her sister for being a hanger-on to Pansy, herself a hanger-on to Draco (_Are we Slytherins or not, able to stand on our own two feet?_ she wanted to rage at her), she was also…grateful. Her weak, proud older sister was her buffer. And now her weak, proud older sister was a nobody. She hadn't had the courage to stand up to the Death Eaters when Professor Slughorn sent the summons to the Battle at Hogwarts, but she hadn't had the depth of evil to join the Death Eaters like Pansy and Blaise, either. She'd stayed home, and she'd stayed home ever since. No one could get her out of the house.

Some days Astoria almost wished she'd taken the Sorting Hat up on its offer to put her in Gryffindor, but if she had, she would never have heard the last of it from her family, who expected Slytherin or Ravenclaw out of their children. Well, she couldn't be Ravenclaw. No _passion_, that lot of knowledge-obsessed bookworms. And anyway, she knew she was Slytherin. Maybe a better Slytherin than Draco Malfoy himself. She had ambitions that went beyond petty quarrels over blood and talent, over short-sighted House rivalries. A good Slytherin ought to take the long view. If you wanted to make something of yourself, you ignored all that extraneous nonsense and pushed ahead to the goal.

The only extraneous nonsense she hadn't been able to cure herself of was fancying Draco Malfoy. She despised herself for that. Fancying that arrogant, posturing, bullying git? How could you know someone for five years, know his every fault and failure to be an ordinary, decent human being, catalogue every cruelty and bullying action, and still have fancied him from the first moment you laid eyes on him as a silly little First Year? How could you know in your heart that he deserved everything that happened to him and still feel like you were bleeding inside to see it?

Thankfully, she'd been able to hide her stupidity from everyone. Everyone except Draco's startling sister, startlingly like him, startlingly unlike him. She'd liked Lucia from the start, wanted her in Slytherin, was afraid she would be. When you recognized a kindred spirit in someone, you laid yourself open, became vulnerable, and who knew what would happen? Astoria had made it her business to keep from being vulnerable, and all it had taken was a glance from vivid blue eyes to lay bare her most secret secret. Draco's _sister,_ of all the unfair things!

At the moment, the unfair thing was sitting on the couch in the Slytherin common room where Draco had often sat, her hair an odd shade of pale green, talking animatedly to what looked like most of Slytherin, half of whom also seemed to have green hair. The littlest ones no longer seemed afraid of her; instead they were laughing madly at something she was telling them. She was different than she'd been on the train, less calm uncertainty, more freedom of expression.

"I see you've already established yourself," Astoria said slightly sourly.

Lucia grinned at her. "Slytherin after all, you see? I figured I had better tell everyone the truth about me so they won't be wondering."

_And starting rumours._ Astoria had to admire the way she'd faced the issue head-on. She could tell some of the older Slytherins didn't quite believe her account of herself. _That's my job, I suppose._ "What do you think of our common room? Bit dramatic and gloomy, don't you think?"

"A bit," Lucia admitted.

"Just wait till you see the Potions classroom," one of the Second Years said. "When Professor Snape was here…" His voice trailed off.

"Alright, you lot. Bedtime. Off you go."

There was some complaining, but they were already yawning.

"I wonder if there's time left for me to call my Mum," Lucia mused.

"Call her?" a Third Year asked. "Like stick your head out of a window and yodel?"

"No," she laughed. "Call her on this." She pulled a small black thing out of her pocket and unfolded it.

"What is _that?_ Looks like something the Weasleys would invent."

"Coo, you have a _mobile phone?"_ one of the Muggle-born First Years gasped.

"My Mum got it for me so we could stay in contact while she's in Europe."

"Is that a _Muggle_ device?" one of the Fourth Years asked, a trace of disdain in his voice.

"It is, and so much more convenient than an owl. Instant communication that won't raise eyebrows on the train. Now if only I can get a signal in a dungeon, that'll be the miracle."

"Come up to my room," Astoria offered. "It's the only one with a window."

"Thanks."

Most of the Slytherin dormitories were spread out through the dungeon, but the Prefects' rooms were prime real estate, up a level, with ground-level windows. Astoria flopped on her bed while Lucia hung out the window with her odd little device held to her ear.

"Hey, Mum! I did it! I got in Slytherin!" Lucia laughed at her mother's response. "Well, yes, I must confess I am slightly regretting the loss of Ravenclaw's beautiful book-lined common room. The Slytherin common room is really gloomy. It's a dungeon! But that doesn't matter. I am where I'm supposed to be. I think Hogwarts is going to be wonderful. Anyway, no one's been mean to me yet. All the Slytherins are kind of scared of me, I think, but it's early days still. How's Venice? Do you have any leads?" She was silent a few moments. "Yes, I am worried about him. I mean, what if he's in danger right now? I know it can take a while to find people, especially when you're not used to their world, but what if it takes so long that it's…too late? And then if you do find him, how are _you_ going to help him? He wouldn't want to have anything to do with you…" She sighed. "Yes, I know we went over all this and it's pointless to worry about what hasn't happened yet. I can't help it. Well, alright. Thanks, Mum. I love you too. Bye."

"Everything alright?" Astoria asked.

"Don't know, really. My mum is searching for a sort of long-lost relative who might be in trouble. That's what she does, looks for people. She's absolutely brilliant."

Astoria offered her a smile. "Well, I hope she finds him."

She received a smile in return. "Thanks. Well, I'm for bed now. Thanks for everything, Astoria."

* * *

**Author's note: I may have tweaked the timeline a little as regards Graham Pritchard, because at this point in the canon he might be a 5th year instead of a 6th year, but it suited me to make him a 6th year, and he's not important enough in the canon for it to be important.**

**Also, I'd like to note that Astoria's reflections on Ravenclaw don't parallel mine at all. I would be in Ravenclaw if I were anywhere, and I'm proud to call myself a knowledge-obsessed bookworm.**


	14. Mentors

**Mentors, or**

**Summer Blossoms Scent the Air**

**Chapter 14**

The first days of classes were a whirl. It was a bit humiliating being in Charms and Transfigurations with the little kids, but now that she had a wand that really responded to her fingers, she had a feeling spells were going to come naturally. Professor Moonshine was pleased with her Potions knowledge and, after administering a test, advanced her into Fourth Year. History of Magic was the one great disappointment. How could you take the best subject and make it so _boring?_ How did Professor Binns expect the students to learn when they weren't engaged? And then Defense Against the Dark Arts was intimidating. In the first place, it was taught by Professor McGonagall, who was intimidating in and of herself. As a Gryffindor, she was legendary; as a Scotswoman, she was strong and stern; as a Headmistress, she was authoritarian; and just as herself she was sharp and powerful and…intimidating. But added to that was the subject. Defense Against the Dark Arts. Most of these children had experience in that. They'd been through a fearsome war. Their pale, intent faces on the first day of class showed their associations with the subject. Even the Muggle-borns knew about it, though not as much as Lucia, who, with her mother and Miss Precipa, had read all the newspaper articles, listened to all the secret radio broadcasts She heard the stories later from Miss Precipa, who seemed to know people in every part of it. She knew more than the Muggle-borns, had experienced less than the Wizard-borns, was in a strange in-between place where no one else was.

She had, however, read and practically memorized not only the First Year book but also the Second Year book. And then there was Astronomy to look forward to, late at night with Professor Sinistra, and then she had the special Magical Plants and Creatures lessons. She did not know how they'd found out about her wand making, but she'd found herself lined up for private lessons with Professors Sprout and Hagrid for the understanding of wood and magical creature core materials.

On the first day, after the first onslaught of classes, she sat at the Slytherin table, already starting on homework. There were a few others in the Great Hall at work as well, and across the way at the Hufflepuff table she caught suspicious eyes peering at her over the tops of books. She tried to ignore them, applying herself to her Charms essay, which was supposed to be about the famous uses of _Wingardium Leviosa_ but which she was expanding to include an analysis of the linguistic structure of the spell itself. She didn't see any point in doing normal First Year homework when all she really needed was to learn how to do the spells themselves.

Taking her wand out of her bookbag, she unwrapped the black velvet from around it. She'd never seen anyone keeping their wands wrapped up, but with the way it stimulated her nervous system when she touched it, she didn't want to stick her hand into her bag and accidentally brush it. When she picked it up, it became part of her again. Fixing her eyes on the quill pen, she gave the slightest swish and a tiny flick and whispered, _"Wingardium Leviosa."_ The quill pen rose up in the air, steadily following the tip of the piece of holly in her hand. It whirled around in circles when she made circular motions and skimmed along the surface of the table just as it would if she were holding it. She was grinning quietly to herself when she set it back on the table. She'd _known_ it was going to come naturally.

"You do that very well," a light voice came beside her. "You're new at it, though, aren't you?"

Lucia smiled at Luna. "Yes, I am."

"Can I sit with you?"

"Of course, if you're allowed." The other Slytherins at the table were giving them shocked looks.

"I don't think there's ever been a rule against it. It just rarely happens."

"It's about time it did. Luna, were there any Slytherins in Dumbledore's Army?"  
"Oh, yes, there were two. Alice Tolipan and Luca Caruso. They had to hide it from the other Slytherins, though. They were very afraid of what Draco would do to them if he found out." She gave Lucia a questioning glance from her wide eyes. "Do you mind me talking about Draco?"

"Not at all. I don't even know him."

"He wasn't a nice boy, but he was very troubled. That's what Moaning Myrtle says."

"Moaning Myrtle?"

"She's a ghost. She says Draco was her friend. I suppose he didn't mind talking to a dead girl."

"I think I'd like to meet her." She'd already been introduced to the Bloody Baron. What ghost could be worse than that?

"I can introduce you sometime. I'm sorry you're not in Ravenclaw."

"Thank you," Lucia said softly, "but I'm not. At least not mostly. I don't see why Slytherin shouldn't be given a chance."

Luna smiled her sweet, dreamy smile. "That's a good thought."

"Why did you come back this year? Weren't you one of the ones who could have graduated?"

"Oh, yes, but I missed half of last year after Harry rescued me from Malfoy Manor. Hardly anyone had any real education all year anyway. I thought it would be good for me."

"What do you mean, he rescued you from Malfoy Manor?"

"Oh, didn't you know? They kidnapped me. Oh, here comes Professor Sinistra with your mentor. I'll talk to you later, Lucia."

She drifted away while Lucia stared after her. Then she stood up quickly as Professor Sinistra approached. She had spoken to her Head of House for the first time that morning, in the Slytherin common room, and liked her even better for her low, even voice and the kindness there as she welcomed her to Hogwarts. Professor Sinistra did not seem like the typical Slytherin, nothing at all what you would expect a Slytherin teacher to be like. It made Lucia wonder if the common view of the "typical" Slytherin hadn't been twisted by recent events until it was impossible to view Slytherins as anything but power-hungry, arrogant, angry Pure-Bloods. And if maybe there weren't a lot of ordinary, decent Slytherins out there who were afraid to raise their heads and _be_ ordinary, decent Slytherins. What if the most famous Slytherin of all, Tom Riddle, had done that on purpose? Divide Hogwarts, pit one House against the others, make it a place where he could distort ambitions and foster his followers while eliminating common decency?

"Miss Bonnefoy, are you alright?"

Lucia started. "Oh, sorry, Professor. Just thinking."

"I'm sorry to interrupt your thoughts, but I'd like to introduce you to your mentor. This is Chador Uil, from Ravenclaw, Sixth Year."

"Hallo," said Chador, looking slightly embarrassed. He was a tall boy, tall and almost transparently thin, with a long, thin face, a somewhat untidy mass of almost curly black hair falling into pale grey eyes, and a thin mouth slipping sideways into a shy smile. His cheekbones stood out and the lines went round and deep around the corners of his mouth when he smiled.

"Hello," Lucia said quietly. She'd slightly hoped Luna was to be her mentor, but of course Luna was a Seventh Year. At least she'd still got someone from Ravenclaw. A lot of the youngest Slytherins seemed to have been paired with Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors. Which was good of course. No one like a Hufflepuff to teach you patience and perseverance, they said, and hopefully Gryffindor-Slytherin pairings would help eliminate the House rivalry—make that _antipathy._ But she was still glad for a Ravenclaw.

Suddenly she went red. She'd been thinking again without listening to what Professor Sinistra was saying. Something about wands. She caught a glint of sympathetic humour in Chador's eyes.

"I'll leave you two to get acquainted, then," Sinistra said and walked away with a smile and a swirl of olive robes.

"Nothing more awkward than 'getting acquainted,'" Chador murmured, folding himself up onto the bench. His speech was faintly accented. "But I thought I was the only one who did that."

"Did what?"

"Started thinking and forgot to talk."

Lucia laughed. "No, I think Luna does it too."

The lines went deep around his mouth. "Yes, I think she does."

"What was Professor Sinistra saying, when I…was thinking?"

"Only that I've been assigned to you because I'm good with a wand, and you haven't had any wand training. My best subjects are Charms, Transfigurations, Potions, and Defense Against the Dark Arts. Worst are Divination, Herbology, and Care of Magical Creatures. Perfectly adequate in all the rest."

"I think Charms and Transfigurations are going to be alright, but Defense Against the Dark Arts already has me a bit scared."

"No reason to be scared of it now." He said it slightly flatly, and her response was impulsive.

"Were you here? Last spring?"

"Yes." He answered with so little expression she felt she'd blundered.

"Where are you—are you from Yugoslavia?"

Dark eyebrows went up as expression returned. "Croatia. I was born there. How do you know?"

"_Chador._ It's Serbo-Croatian for _shadow._ My mum travels a lot for work, and she brings home dictionaries from the countries she goes to. I like to read them."

"You like to read _foreign-language dictionaries?"_

Lucia shrugged. "I like languages."

"And you're not in Ravenclaw?"

She shrugged again, not feeling like explaining. "Your last name's not Croatian, though, is it?"

"Dutch. My dad's Dutch and French, my mum's Croatian. Means _owl._ Great name for a kid, don't you think? 'Shadow Owl.'"

Lucia grinned. "I think it suits you. But when did you come to England?"

"When I was eight. My parents could sense there was a war coming on and left Yugoslavia before it started. Out of one war and into another," he murmured. "Anyway, they wanted me to go to Hogwarts and not to Durmstrang as I'd have to if we'd stayed. Now you have to tell me if something I've heard is true."

Lucia repressed a sigh. Here was the inevitable question. _Are you really Lucius Malfoy's daughter?_

"Is it true that your mum is Perdita Bonhomme?"

Lucia gaped at him. "You've _heard_ of my mum? All anyone around here cares about is who my father is."

Chador gave a half-grin. "I figured you'd probably had enough of that. But really, it _is_ your mum, isn't it? The Croatian population in England's not that big, so even Muggles and Wizards stick together, and everyone knows how she went to Croatia just at the end of the war to find someone everyone said had to be dead. We know his cousin."

"That's wonderful," Lucia said with a laugh. "I never expected to meet someone related to one of her cases _here."_

"And is it really true? That she's descended from—"

"Sherlock Holmes?" Lucia nodded.

Chador's grey eyes lit up with eagerness. "I can't believe it! No one believes he actually existed! Fiction, you know."

"Yes, well, that's what I thought about _Alice__."_

"Who?"

"You'd have to ask Luna."

"Oh. But that means that he's your great—"

"—great-grandfather."

"How could that happen? There's no story about him having children."

"Well, no, there wouldn't be. He'd never have spoken to Dr. Watson again if he'd written about it. But my mother has all the birth certificates. It took her ages to track them down. You see, she was adopted as a little girl by Hugh Bonhomme, my grandfather, and she never knew who she was. It was wanting to know that got her into the people-finding business. _She_ was the first person she found. She leaned that her father was forty-seven when she was born and was dying of lung cancer—smoking. And since her mother ran off, he gave her up for adoption. His name was Holmes, which is a common enough name—and means _holly,_ if you care. Jean-Luc Holmes. He was born in France in 1917, the son of a quick marriage between a French girl and a British solder who died at Passendale. She found out about the soldier. _His_ name was Damien Adler-Holmes."

Wait—never! _Adler?"_

"Yes. He was born in 1893."

"Eighteen-ninety-three," Chador repeated, thinking. "After Reichenbach Falls—before his return to life."

"You _do_ know your Holmes. Damien's father never knew until years later, when he was sent a telegram informing him of the death of the son he never knew he had. We don't know much about his response, but from an extant letter he wrote, it seems to have affected him deeply."

"You talk like a book."

She went pink. "My mother's writing a book about them. They were all quite extraordinary men, she says. Her father taught physics to Stephen Hawking when he was at Oxford. _His_ father was given the Distinguished Service order for his bravery at Passendale, though of course it only came after his death. She's still trying to locate the medal itself. Do you know what I'm talking about? All this Muggle stuff…"

"I'm a quarter Muggle myself. My dad's mum was a Muggle. Nothing near as interesting as any of your family, though."

She raised her eyebrows. "'Interesting,' yes."

"Sorry—I didn't mean—"

"Don't worry. They _are_ interesting. If by that you mean very, very strange." She gave him a grin. "Oh, I say, I'm going to be late for Defense Against the Dark Arts!"

"Better run. You don't want to be late for Professor McGonagall."

She quickly collected her things. "Say, are you any good at flying?"

"Er—yes. I'm the Ravenclaw Seeker this year."

"Good. I'm going to need help. I couldn't get the wretched broom up off the ground earlier."


	15. Wand Materials

**Wand-Materials, or**

**The Wild-Rose Briar is Sweet In the Spring**

**Chapter 15**

"So, my dear, you're interested in wand woods," said Professor Sprout when they met in her greenhouses on the second day of classes for Lucia's first private tutoring session.

"Er—I think so," Lucia answered. "Especially holly, which is what my wand is, but also I want to know about hawthorn. Are there certain woods that help evil—you know, Dark Magic—more than good?"

Fluffy-looking Professor Sprout blinked at her. "Why do you ask that, dear?"

_Oh dear. I don't think that came out right._ "Well—Young Ollivander told me that the Malfoys usually use certain kinds of wood, none of which worked for me, and I was wondering if—you know—evil people are attracted to certain kinds of wood. And if maybe we shouldn't use those kinds for wands."

"Oh, I see. Well, I'm afraid it's not quite that simple, my dear. It's not so clear-cut—this plant is good, that one is bad—just as it isn't with people. The thistles that tear your clothes are good to eat, and the poisonous root of foxglove is a self-protecting mechanism. Your own holly—did you know that it is poisonous but it protects from danger?"

"Yes, I did know that," Lucia murmured.

Professor Sprout gave her a gentle pat on the shoulder. "Perhaps in the same way not every person who has done evil has fully given himself over to evil, Miss Bonnefoy. Now, let's go take a look at my favorite holly and hawthorn trees, since they interest you so. Did you know hawthorn is related to the rose? It's also very good for heart problems, including a broken heart, and it's said to bring hope. It's a bit mysterious though. It can present as one thing while often really being something entirely different.…"

"Erm…Miss Bonnefoy," Professor Hagrid said, meeting her outside his strange little house. He looked as uncertain as he felt. He was a great war hero, and huge besides, so she didn't quite see why _he_ should be uncertain around _her,_ though after classes yesterday evening, Astoria had hinted that Draco had given him trouble all during his years here, so maybe that was it. She couldn't help it that in her black Hogwarts robes she looked so much like her half-brother.

"He—well, I'm supposed ter teach yeh about the core materials for makin' wands," he finally said uncomfortably, looming far above her. "Not that I know anything about muckin' about with wands. Not me. Mine was broke. They let me have a new one, but it's not as good as—well." He coughed. "But I do know things about magical creatures, mind, so I can tell yeh all about the materials—jest not the _wand_ bit." He gave her a hard look, and she tried to nod as if she understood completely, which she didn't. "This curriculum they sent me isn't goin' ter do at all, yeh know. 'The properties of unicorn hair—' Each lesson'd take one hour, and then you'd be done after three hours with no real learnin', except a lot of information yeh could just get from a bloomin' book." He looked disgusted. "There isn't no use separatin' the _materials_ from the _creature,_ you see what I mean? Unicorn hair isn't unicorn hair without it came from a _unicorn,_ see?"

"I think so," Lucia said slowly. "To really understand the properties of unicorn hair, you have to understand unicorns."

He gave her a surprised look. "That's righ'. Yeh sound like yeh have _some_ intelligence."

"So they tell me."

"Unlike some others I know," he muttered. "Well, come on then. Yeh got good shoes?"

"Yes." She hurried after him across the lawn. "Professor, where are we going?"

"Forbidden Forest, o'course. Where else'r yeh goin' ter see unicorns around here?"

"_See_ unicorns, sir?"

"O'course. Yeh didn' think yeh were goin' ter read about 'em in a _book,_ did yeh?"

"I never considered seeing unicorns before, is all." It was such a combination of the ridiculous (no one at home would _ever_ believe it!) and the sublime (_unicorns!)_.

She hurried after Professor Hagrid into the dark edges of the Forbidden Forest. He went quickly and easily, for such a huge man, knowing where he was going and not faltering. Lucia tripped over fallen branches and bushes behind him.

"Are yeh scared?"

"Of what?" she asked blankly.

"The Forbidden Forest."

"Should I be?"

"It can be dangerous, when yeh don' know what you're doing. Most students is scared of it. Yer bro—" He stopped short.

"My brother was afraid of it." Suddenly she remembered his journal entry. He'd been terrified. "He grew up with stories about it. I didn't. Anyway, he saw something worth being scared of. What's here to be afraid of now?"

"Oh, jest trees an' spiders an' centaurs an' unicorns. If yeh know how ter deal with 'em, you'll be fine."

"What's to be scared of about unicorns?"

He gave her a look as if taking back his estimation of her intelligence. "How 'bout the big horn on their heads? They're not soft an' fluffy an' cuddly like Muggles like ter think about 'em, yeh know. They're very dangerous. It's the most beautiful ones as is the most dangerous. That's 'cos with them yeh never expect it. Yeh think yeh can walk righ' up an' pat 'em on the nose and steal a bit o' hair. That's stupid thinking that'll get yeh gored by a beautiful an' very sharp horn."

"Then how do you get unicorn hair?"

"Clever chaps like that Ollivander learn ter follow 'em and collect hair that catches on bushes. I have loads of it I got like that. Or sometimes they set traps an' catch 'em an' pull or cut the hair. It works better if it hasn't been sittin' aroun' in the air fer days, though moonlight's good for it. But I heard tell of people earnin' their trust an' bein' allowed ter pluck it by the unicorns themselves. Never managed it meself," he said regretfully. "But even then they're dangerous. Skittish, an' always ready to imagine a slight. Proud, too, but scared of folks."

_That sounds familiar._ She couldn't quite see Draco as a unicorn, not with the connotation of beauty and grace about them, but they did sound like they weren't quite as _noble_ as Muggle tales would have you believe. And he _did_ have unicorn hair in his hawthorn wand.

She followed Professor Hagrid deeper into the Forest.

Sitting in a corner of the Slytherin common room that evening, Lucia tried to link together all the different things she'd learned. How did hawthorn being related to roses and unicorns being dangerous affect the way their parts worked together in a single wand? She was sure it did, in some way, but there was still so much to learn.

A body dropped into the comfortable chair opposite her, and after a moment she shot to her feet. "I'm sorry, Professor! I didn't see you!"

"It's alright, Lucia," Professor Sinistra said, amusedly.

Lucia sat back down. "I'm not usually this absent-minded. It's just everything's so new and different. And interesting."

"I'm glad you find it interesting. And hope you'll find my class one of the interesting parts." Her dark eyes crinkled up in amusement.

"Well, I like astronomy…" Lucia offered, somewhat awkwardly.

"Don't mind me. I'm just being **awkward**. Tell me about your two tutoring sessions today. Was it alright with Hagrid?"

"Yes…He didn't like Draco, did he?"

"No, I'm afraid not. Draco was unrelentingly difficult in his classes. But he's a sweet man and won't blame you. It's a very unusual course of study you've started upon. Do you know how dangerous it can be?"

"Young Ollivander told me a little. I didn't _know_ I was interested in it, even if I did make my own wand. They just told me I was doing these special tutoring sessions. But the lessons with Professor Hagrid and Professor Sprout today were so _interesting._ I think I really am interested in it. I was just sitting here trying to figure out all the pieces of how one goes together."

Professor Sinistra smiled her serene smile. "On your own time? I'd say that makes you interested. But I want you to know what you're getting into. It needs a very deft hand at magic, an instinctive understanding of everything involved, and an instinct for people, too. It's immensely complicated." She smiled at Lucia's curious look. "I studied wand-making too, but in the end I chose astronomy. I loved it better. You'll have time to choose what direction you're going."

"That's good, because I want to be a professor here someday, and I've never heard of a wand maker being a professor. I don't know which I'd choose."

"You may not have to choose between them. The criteria for professorship isn't your profession but the skills and experience you have had. With the wide variety of skills wand-making requires, there would be any number of things you can teach."

"Really?"

"Certainly. Don't be afraid to be…" She gave a kind of smirk. "Ambitious. After all, that's what Slytherin is all about, isn't it?"

"Within reason," Lucia smiled.


	16. Influences

**Influences, or**

**When They Are Both Full Grown**

**Chapter 16**

"_Si_, he had a room here," the Roman woman told Dita in Italian. "He only stayed a few days and went on again. I remembered him from a few years ago when he used to hang around. A bad boy, that one. I felt him so before, but now he was only unhappy. I thought maybe he was hiding. He wanted to see no one. He seemed afraid of everyone, and he was afraid of sleep."

"I don't doubt it," Dita murmured.

"He was such a strange boy. Not like any English boy I ever met. What was wrong with him?"

"His parents tried to make him kill someone he respected."

_"B__ontà mia__!"_

"Do you know where he went when he left?"

"No, I am sorry."

_A bad boy, that one,_ Dita repeated in her mind as she went away to her own hotel. She didn't doubt that. Bad parents often created bad children. How easy it was to dismiss someone as simply a bad person and no longer have to think about him, unless his badness intruded on one's own world. But that was never the end of the story. Dita knew from experience that the worst people, the very worst, could have a chance to change and improve their lives. Sometimes a traumatic event could tip them away from their previous pursuits; sometimes it required punishments; always it required another human to lead them toward what was good. And why had no one done that for him at school? Again, it was easy to say it wasn't Albus Dumbledore's or Severus Snape's job to be his parent, but the truth was that if a school held nearly sole control over young people for seven full years, it was the school's responsibility to turn out young adults who contributed to a better society. So much trouble had been spent over Harry Potter, and with good reason and good result; why couldn't similar trouble be taken for the students who came in as thorough-going bad lots? You couldn't force a child to become a good person, but you could surround him with better influences than it seemed Hogwarts had surrounded Draco with.

_At least one child of Lucius Malfoy has had a chance,_ she told herself fiercely. _Lucia will never be in the position Draco is in now, whatever that is, thank God._


	17. Of Brooms and Prejudices

**Of Brooms and Prejudices, or**

**When The Bare And Wintry Woods We See**

**Chapter 17**

"Right, so just put your hand over it and say, 'Up!'"

"I did that a million times in class, and it didn't work," Lucia said, frustrated. "You can't imagine how humiliating it is to still be standing on the ground while all the little kids are hovering around you. Madam Hooch couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. I think it's because the practice brooms are made out of elm, and I don't like elm."

Chador gave her a shrewd look. "You mean you're letting your own prejudices get in the way."

She stared at him. "Does it work like that?"

"I don't know. It seems logical. I mean, there's a sort of intelligence in magic, isn't there? If you secretly don't want something to happen, maybe you can make it not happen. What do you have against elm?"

After a moment, she said unwillingly, "Maybe that it's the wood my father's wand was made out of."

Chador's eyes went wide. "Oh. That could be a problem then." He sat down on the grass, and she followed suit. "That could be quite important, you know. How—can I ask—how do you feel about him?"

"Yes, you can ask. I'd almost rather everyone knew than go around thinking I secretly want to be like him. I've never met him, and he scares me, and I know he's done really horrible things. I think most people have been kind of afraid of him, but it's even worse for me because he has some kind of claim on me and could do horrible things to my mother if he ever decided he wanted to raise me like Draco."

"Not anymore, though. I don't know if people like him have any power anymore. At least not any social power, if you know what I mean. He's not _important_ anymore."

Lucia gave a half smile. "Yes, I suppose that's true. How much power do you think importance gives people?"

"A lot. I don't know if anyone's ever studied it before, though."

"Ravenclaws," Lucia said with a smirk. "All you ever think about is studying things."

"Of course. _Someone's_ got to understand how things work."

"I was just teasing you. I like studying things too."

"_Slytherins_ tease?"

"Oh, shut up."

Chador smirked back. "Well, anyway, I think understanding things can help you stop being afraid of them."

"Or teach you that they're really worth being afraid of."

"Or that. But not in the case of a tree. If you're going to make wands, you can't afford to hate a certain kind of wood. Maybe your father had a wand made out of elm, but so did a lot of other people."

"Like who?"

After a moment, he went red. "I…can't think of any at the moment. I haven't memorized every great wand in history, you know. That's _your_ job. Alright then. Forget wands. Take brooms. Lots of common brooms are made out of elm because it's an extremely straight wood but it's also bendable, so you can have a nice straight broom if you want, or you can get one custom made with all sorts of aerodynamic and maneuverability qualities to it. It's a _nice_ wood."

"It's associated with death," Lucia said darkly.

Chador sighed. "Fine. I'll let you use mine. It's spruce. It's a Cleansweep Eight, so it's fast and very maneuverable. Touchy, though. That's why they don't give them to beginners. But you have to promise me that you'll talk to Professor Sprout about elm, because if you kill yourself on my broom, Madame Hooch will never let me play Quidditch again."

"I promise." Her voice was solemn, but her eyes twinkled.

She expected him to go off into the castle to fetch his broom, but instead he held out his hand and said, _"Accio broom!"_ and moments later his sleek broom was in his hand. He grinned at her wide eyes. "We all learned that from Harry Potter a few years ago." And then again his grin faded, and his face went bleak and tight. "Well, never mind. Try this." He put the broom on the ground.

Lucia put her hand over it and said, "Up!" and to her delight the handle hit her hand.

"It's very obedient," Chador explained. "Sometimes too much so. It has a tendency to interpret your slightest movement as command. You can't go wriggling about on it at all, and even shifting your seat might send you off in the wrong direction. That's why it's so good for a Seeker but not so good for a beginner." He gave her a mock-severe look. "That's why they make very tame brooms for beginners. They don't give them Cleansweep Eights."

"I get the point."

"Good. I think I'll set a couple of spells on it to prevent falling off and to make it obey me instead of the rider if I want it to." He pulled out a wand of golden brown wood and muttered some Latin-sounding phrases, then caught her eye. "Rowan, with Veela hair. We went back to the Continent to get it when I started here, because Ollivander won't use Veela hair, but Veelas are native to the mountains in Croatia where we were from, and my parents wanted me to have part of home here. It's touchy, too, like my broom, except it has more of a mind of its own sometimes. Usually it knows what it's about, though, and it knows what I want in a very unusual way."

"That's what mine is like," Lucia said in surprise. "Not like it has a mind of its own but actually like it's part of my own mind."

"Not mine. It's more like we have a partnership. At first it took a little while to get used to it, and I was the most destructive First Year in Charms, but then suddenly we understood each other, and I have always led my classes in wand work."

"Interesting. Somebody needs to do a study of psychology and wands, I think. My mother studies a lot of psychology for her work, and it's very interesting. And it's not like Muggle areas of study can't be applied to Wizard areas of study. It's kind of stupid how Wizards tend to think they're so much better and different than everybody else."

Chador grinned and shook his head. "Get on the broom."

"I'm just trying to put it off a little while longer. I don't think I'm going to like it."

"Of course you will."

She didn't, really. Floating around above the ground made her uneasy, and she clutched the broom too tightly, so that it bucked under her and would have thrown her off if not for Chador's anti-falling spells and his quickness to take hold of it from the ground.

"Maybe it's a good thing the elm brooms wouldn't obey you," he said in something like awe. "I'd hate to see what a wood you didn't like would do to you up there. The only person I've seen worse than you was Neville Longbottom."

"If they made them out of holly, I'd probably be perfectly fine," she muttered. "Of course my _brother_ is a very good flyer. Maybe I'm glad I'm not."


	18. Parchments

**Parchments, or**

**Green Groweth the Holly**

**Chapter 18**

_ Dear Mum,_ wrote Lucia in the letter (on parchment) an owl had just dropped on Dita's lap, earning an incredulous look from the other person occupying the bench in the park in Budapest.

_Everything's been going well at school. It's all quiet, no excitement, which everyone is very happy about, because exciting things have been happening continually for seven years or something, and everyone's sick of it. That's what Chador says. I know he's sick of it. Any time the War comes up, he looks like he's trying _very _hard not to think of it, and the harder he tries the more he thinks of it, and then it makes him look like his skin is stretched too tight over his bones. Luna talks about it very calmly, but she's glad it's over too. Astoria says she's sick of it, but I think she kind of misses the excitement. Sometimes I wonder if she really should have been in Gryffindor. But she's a good prefect for Slytherin, so maybe she's just what Slytherin needs. I mean, they all seem pretty _normal,_ you know, not crazy like I sort of expected Slytherins to be. The little kids kind of watch the older ones to find out how Slytherins are supposed to act now, and poor Astoria is the one who has to decide how Slytherins are going to act and show them. And me too, Professor Sinistra says, because I'm an older Slytherin too _and_ a Malfoy, technically. I _told_ that Hat it was right for me to be in Slytherin _because_ of who my relatives are _and_ because I'm just normal, more or less. Having Astoria and Luna and Chador as my friends certainly helps. Luna says she used to be very unpopular, but now that she's a hero from the war, everyone's nice to her. Which doesn't seem quite right to me. Shouldn't you be nice to someone whether she's a hero or not? And anyway, Luna is very, very odd but very, very sweet. How could you not be nice to her?_

_ Speaking of Luna, Mummy, she introduced me to Moaning Myrtle, who is one of the strangest people I ever met. Not just because she's a ghost, which is strange enough, but because it seems like the whole purpose of her existence (if she _exists)_ is to whinge and be weird. Of course she _was_ murdered, which is horrible. You can't help being sorry for her and annoyed at her at the same time. Luna told me Draco was Myrtle's friend, but Myrtle won't tell me about him yet. She keeps promising and putting it off. I think she wants me to keep coming back to visit her. It must be so _dull_ to be a ghost. I wonder if Luna and I could get her interested in something else. It'll look strange for us always to be hanging around bathrooms (Myrtle died in one), but Luna's never afraid of looking strange. I admire her for that. So does Chador. He says you never do or learn anything new if you're afraid of looking different from everybody else. He's a very smart boy. I wonder if he likes Luna. They're both in Ravenclaw. But she's a year older._

_ Anyway, my classes are going well too, even DADA and flying. Professor McGonagall isn't as scary as I thought she'd be. She's strict, but she's always _fair._ Professor Snape was never fair, they say. He always favored Slytherins, which seems kind of stupid to me. Professor Sinistra doesn't. She's fair too, but she's less stern than Professor McGonagall. Some of the others (even Slytherins) say she's boring, but that's only because she talks quietly and evenly and doesn't make a big fuss. It must be very strange going from Professor Snape to her. I'm not sure if they miss him or not._

_ Oh, and I finally managed to make one of the elm brooms obey me, after almost a month and a half of trying. Chador's spruce broom was very finicky and didn't like me, and they finally found me an old walnut broom that behaves very well, but Professor Sprout and I have also been looking into the properties of elm to see if knowledge can't overcome my prejudice, and it seems to have done. At least it has begun to do. It won't fly me more than two feet off the ground yet, but Chador thinks that's because I don't want it to, which Madam Hooch said was "an interesting theory" and then never mentioned again. Doesn't _anyone_ study these things? People keep saying I should be in Ravenclaw because I want to know how everything works, but Slytherins have to know how things work too. They really should have Science of Magic classes. Maybe when I teach here…_

_ I suppose I should stop writing before this parchment gets too heavy for the poor owl. Victoria keeps playing with the feather in my quill pen as I write, which is why my handwriting is so bad. She always comes with me to my classes, though I wonder what will happen when she's too big to fit in my pocket. Professor McGonagall seems to be the only one who knows she's there, and she's never complained about it. I wonder if that's because she's a cat herself, being an Animagus. I wonder what it feels like to turn into an animal and if you stop _thinking_ when you do._

_ Write back and tell me if you're close to finding Draco._

_ Love, Lucia_

Dita smiled as she rolled up the parchment. Reading between the lines, she could tell that Lucia was as happy as she'd ever been, perfectly in her element. "I wonder if" and "I wonder how" had always been her pet phrases.

As for herself, she'd had the same growing sense of the foreboding about Draco that his mother had described. Maybe it was only because of traveling for several weeks across what used to be Yugoslavia, where a war at least as terrible as the recent Wizarding War had ended only a couple years ago. You could still see it in the buildings and in the people. She knew exactly what Lucia meant when she spoke of Chador's response to mentions of the War. She had been barred from entering Kosovo, where the war was still raging below the surface despite a ceasefire a couple months ago, but she'd been able to pick up Draco's trail all across Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia. What had it been like for him, traveling across this devastation while running from devastation back home and carrying his own devastation with him?


	19. The Philosophy and Science of Ghosts

**The Philosophy and Science of Ghosts, or**

**The Holly Bears a Berry As Red As Any Blood**

**Chapter 19**

"What did you like to do when you were in Ravenclaw?" Lucia asked the squat, transparent girl sitting next to her on the edge of the bath in the deserted bathroom.

"You mean when I was alive?" Myrtle snapped.

"Yes, that one."

She wasn't sure whether the ghost was going to fly off in a huff or not, but Myrtle chose to look on her interest with favor.

"I can hardly remember," she mused. "I must have liked _something._ It was all a nightmare of being tormented morning, noon, and night! 'Fat Four-Eyes,' Olive used to call me! Well, I got her back, I did!"

Lucia stared at her and wondered if a life really could be reduced down to nothing more than a petty grudge. Was there really so little to Myrtle that she knew nothing more than her last few days of existence? What if ghosts were less than people thought they were? What if this wasn't really _Myrtle_ but only some small portion of her, only the echo of her misery? What if a ghost were no more the real person than one of those moving paintings or photographs? Just an imprint of the worst moments of someone's life. Nearly-Headless Nick thought about practically nothing more than being nearly headless. They weren't _souls,_ surely, because the soul was the most substantial part of a person. If that was so, then what she was dealing with wasn't the fullness of who Myrtle was but only her misery and her malice. What was it about the physical world that wouldn't let go of its pain and evil? And was there some way to make it let go?

"Why are you staring at me like that?" Myrtle demanded.

"Sorry—I was just thinking," Lucia murmured.

"About what?"

"About why it's so hard to get rid of what hurts us."

Myrtle stared at her. "Were you ever hurt?" she asked, strangely soft.

"Not really. Except, I suppose, by finding out that my father was one of the worst people who ever lived. Like a Nazi."

"Like who?"

"Never mind. I wasn't thinking about people who hurt me but about _you._ The way you were hurt."

"Oh." Myrtle preened herself a little. People didn't often think about _her_ pain, and it was the only thing of distinction she had. Ghosts like the Bloody Baron and Nearly-Headless Nick and the Grey Lady had everything going for them, frightening, impressive, beautiful, or amusing as they were. Myrtle was as ugly and avoided in death as in life.

"This is probably a stupid question, but do you like being a ghost? I mean, you know, haunting people and hanging around in drainpipes and bathrooms and causing trouble? Is it worth it?"

Myrtle was about to give her a whinging, smart-aleck reply and jump into the nearest toilet, but then she saw the look of real interest on Lucia's face and said suddenly, "I hate it. We all hate it. Ghosts aren't _happy,_ you know. We have to stay forever in the place where we were killed and the state we were killed in. what if I'd been killed in my underwear? Fat, ugly Myrtle doomed to spend eternity flashing her granny underpants at everyone. We can try to have a bit of fun, scaring people or playing Headless Polo, but it doesn't fix what we really are. And to think that we become ghosts on purpose." She gave a bitter laugh. "The only important decision of my existence, and look where it landed me. In a _bathroom."_

"Did anyone ever try to free you? I don't know what it would take, but it seems like someone _should."_

"Oh, they _tried_ in the 1960s," Myrtle said with a sneer. "Americans it was, all full of talk about freedom and rights, seemed to think the professors were holding us captive here and that some American Muggle royalty told them they had to give us our rights."

"Muggle royalty in America?"

"They said he was a king. 'King said this' and 'King said that.' Ignorant Americans don't even know how to talk about their own king."

Lucia tried very hard not to burst out laughing. "Do you mean Martin Luther King, Jr.?"

"That's it. Not royalty, then?"

"No, Americans don't have kings. Just people _named_ King. But it didn't work?"

"Of course not! I'm still here, aren't I?"

"What did they try?"

"Oh, loads of magic, of course, but they also talked a lot of rubbish about people being kind to us and treating us as if we were still alive."

"I wonder."

"What?"

"If they missed something."

"Of course they missed something!" Myrtle shouted at her.

"No, I mean, thinking about it logically, what is it that is keeping you here? It's the fact that someone did horrible things to you, so horrible you haven't been able to get away from them. My mum says—see, she finds people who are lost, so she has to know a lot of psychology to understand them. Once she came home very sad because she'd found her lost person, living as a homeless person in London, and though his family wanted him back, he wouldn't go back, because he would have to forgive someone who hurt him, and he wouldn't. He would rather live on the streets. And my mum said that sometimes people hurt themselves more by refusing to forgive people than the way they were hurt in the first place. Maybe the person who hurt him _sent_ him to the streets, but it was his refusing to forgive that _kept_ him there. Did those Americans ever suggest you try forgiving the girl who was mean to you? And the person who killed you, too, I suppose."

"Of course not! That's the stupidest thing I ever heard! _Forgive_ Olive? Did she ever deserve being forgiven? _No!_ She deserved me haunting her!"

"I wasn't thinking about what she deserved but what you deserve," Lucia said softly. "I don't think you deserve for your pain to chain you to a bathroom for the rest of time."

"Well, you're stupid!" Myrtle shouted and dived into a toilet.

Lucia sighed and began gathering up her things. So much for ever hearing about Draco. But just as she was leaving, Myrtle's head popped up out of the toilet, which was very disconcerting.

"Draco felt like a ghost himself, you know."

"He did?"

"Not all transparent and dead. Like he was chained up to what hurt him most with no hope of ever escaping, and the only fun he got out of it was haunting Harry Potter and his friends, and that had stopped being fun long ago."

She disappeared again, leaving Lucia to walk slowly back to the Slytherin dungeon and find a place to think.


	20. Voldemort's Second Mistake

**Voldemort's Second Mistake, or**

**Barrenness of Rock that Aches**

**Chapter 20**

Dita wondered how Draco found the words to describe the horror of living under Voldemort's rule and the courage to continue writing about it under his very nose. She had already come to the conclusion that he was something of an abject coward, a trait come by honestly from his father, who pushed those who were weaker and cowered from those who were stronger. Draco was growing up just the same. And yet he expressed what it was like and dared to hide it from his master by the simple expedient of a Muggle cipher.

She couldn't help her heart both aching and rejoicing for what she read as she traveled north through Slovakia and Poland. She rejoiced at Draco's discovery of the truth about what he thought he revered, his opened eyes to what his precious Dark Lord was like. He and his father both had followed evil for the idea of the power it would give them. They wanted their own advancement, had grasped for their own good, had given not a thought to the true nature of what they served. Now Draco recognized his own enslavement, that the Dark Lord cared not a whit for his loyal followers, that there was no kindness, no gratitude, no return loyalty, nothing but pure selfish ambition and vindictive cruelty. He saw the truth of what he thought he wanted, and his soul recoiled from it.

But in Draco's case the truth did not serve to turn him to what was good. Dita ached because he really was enslaved, in his own mind as well as outwardly. The truth only served to push him into yet more furtive hiding and a terrified subservience to evil's will.

Yet there was still more. Everyone knew by now that Draco had been sent to kill Albus Dumbledore and that Dumbledore had saved him, that Draco had been the unwitting tool of Voldemort's demise. But not everyone knew why. No one seemed to recognize that there was something in Draco's life that was, in an odd, skewed way, identical to something in Harry Potter's life: an overriding passion for his family. Family had been drilled into him from birth, family bloodline, family purity, family honor, family loyalty. Everything a Malfoy did, he did for family. Voldemort thought he understood that in the Malfoys, understood, despised, and used it. Forced a young boy to drive himself to horrific deeds and the brink of madness for his family's sake. Here was one situation where fear combined with something more than greed: in this instance it was love driving Draco, fear for more than his own safety, love mixed with fear pushing him to confront what he would have run from, to do the deeds that gave him nightmares, to plunge himself alone into danger because more than himself rested on his courage.

Voldemort never had learned his lesson from the Potters but repeated his mistake with the Malfoys. He had thought their love was a paltry thing, easily overcome, used, and cast aside. Instead he made it a powerful part of the edifice of his own downfall. He had pushed the Malfoys past their ability to endure patiently his attacks on their family. In the end they abandoned him for love, caring nothing for his triumph. In the end it was a mother's love that once again saved Harry Potter's life and once again led to Lord Voldemort's destruction. Narcissa had told Dita what she'd done to save her son, whispered it shamefully after much resistance, unaware that it was the finest moment of her life. In that moment Narcissa Malfoy was on a level with the great, the legendary Lily Potter, and she still didn't know it. Perhaps someday Draco could tell her. Only he and his diary understood what a coward might do when love overcame fear. Evil deeds, to start with, the wrong things for the right reason. But someday perhaps he would have the freedom to choose the right things.


	21. Shadows

**Shadows, or**

**A Prickle As Sharp As Any Thorn**

**Chapter 21**

Lucia had no problems with her fellow students until the end of October, when the awe of Professor McGonagall and the strict discrimination rules had worn off somewhat and the normalcy of school had well set in. It began in small ways, things she thought were accidents. Tripping in the corridor, pumpkin juice tipped into her bag, a sudden rush for stairs pushing her onto the wrong staircase just as it started moving so that she was late for DADA and received extra homework from McGonagall… Then some of the Gryffindors and a few of the Hufflepuffs started "forgetting" her last name and calling her Malfoy. "It's Bonnefoy," she kept repeating, until she was saying it through gritted teeth. They laughed when she couldn't get the elm brooms to go higher than she was tall, and when she was hit in the shoulder by a bludger during a Quidditch match, the Gryffindor Beater apologized and said it was an accident. "Anyway, it's nothing to what happened to Harry Potter during a Quidditch match," said a nearby Hufflepuff. "He had all the bones in his arm taken out. Nobody had it worse than old Harry Potter." And a Ravenclaw neighbor pointedly agreed. Lucia couldn't help but agree too. How much had he borne, sometimes at the hands of the whole school? Should she complain when her troubles were so much more juvenile? Even if her days were quietly becoming miserable at this school where she thought she'd found a natural home, she wasn't fighting giant snakes or running for her life or being tortured by the headmaster. She was just getting along through life. Mummy had said it would take time, people might be unkind, she must remember what they had suffered.

She took to carrying Victoria everywhere she went, concealed in a pocket, and letting the naturally tiny cat warn her whenever someone was coming. She would step behind a statue or into an empty room until she saw who it was, never quite sure if it would be someone who wanted to stuff a dungbomb down her robes, unless it was a teacher, a Slytherin, or Chador or Luna. After scouring books in the library for protective charms, she set protections around her bag and clothing against future pumpkin juice and other depredations and locked her school trunk with another charm, though no one had yet penetrated into her room. Then she sailed along with her chin set and tried to look as if nothing was happening and as if it didn't keep her awake at night.

It was on Halloween Day that Professor McGonagall caught wind of some part of it. Lucia had gone with the Third Year Slytherins to Transfigurations, which they had with the Gryffindor Third Years. It was a little early, they were waiting for McGonagall, and Lucia was occupying herself with turning her quill pen into a fluttering paper bird and back again. She was quite good at Transfigurations (to make up for being so appalling at flying?), and the younger Slytherins were watching with fascination. Suddenly a hand came out and crushed her paper bird, which turned itself back into a broken quill.

"What are you showing off for, _Malfoy?"_ the Gryffindor girl demanded. "We all already know you Malfoys are good at spells."

"Yeah, Malfoy," a boy joined in. "Have you learned any Dark spells recently?"

"Leave her alone!" the Slytherin boy next to her exclaimed. "She's not a Malfoy!"

"You keep out of this, _Slytherin._ They should never have let you back in this school. If you're not careful, you'll wish they hadn't."

The boy wilted a little.

"Looks like bullying isn't confined to Death Eater wannabes, Albert Richard," Lucia said calmly. "I thought you Gryffindors were supposed to be courageous and noble. Picking a fight over nothing at all isn't courageous and noble."

"Don't you dare speak about what Gryffindors are supposed to be, Death-Eater spawn!" the girl shouted.

Lucia went white, but before anyone could say anything else, a voice roared over them all, _"That is enough!"_ No one had seen the small tabby cat picking its fastidious way through the room until it turned into Professor McGonagall in their midst, no one except Lucia, who had felt Victoria's claws in her leg as she was speaking.

McGonagall was furious. As furious, someone said later, as when she was confronting Death Eaters, though that of course was an exaggeration. "Everyone return to your seats! Except you, Della Howard and Albert Richard! You two stand before me!" Her two cowed Gryffindor students stood before her desk. "I am ashamed of you! You are not worthy of being called Gryffindors! From now on, you won't be. I warned you all at the beginning of this semester what would happen to students who carry on the ways we have so recently been delivered from. You will be expelled from this school!"

Lucia was on her feet before she knew what she was doing. "Please, Professor, don't expel them!"

The whole classroom stared at her. "_What_ did you say, Miss Bonnefoy?" McGonagall snapped.

"I said, please don't expel them! Not after what they've been through. During their first year, their school was taken over by a woman whose name means _Pain_ and _Anger,_ and their headmaster was murdered—supposedly by my brother. Their second year they were forced to go to school under headmasters who tortured them, and they watched their friends and family be killed and pursued under a regime headquartered in my brother's house. They might even have had family members killed by my father or brother and their family. And this year they're supposed to come back to school and be friendly with _me_ and pretend like nothing ever happened?"

McGonagall still stared at her, then turned her attention to Albert, who was staring at his shoes, and at Della, whose chin was quivering. "Are you presuming to teach me my job, Miss Bonnefoy?"

"No, Professor." She sank down into her chair and stroked Victoria's head numbly.

"Everyone needs to be taught something sometime, Miss Bonnefoy. Don't ever think you have nothing to teach an adult. I learned that from young Mr. Potter. How do you think up these things, child?"

"I—I—" She stuttered a moment. Then she whispered, "I'm as afraid of my family as they are."

The Gryffindors stared at her. She realized they hadn't gotten to hear her story as the Slytherins had.

After a moment, McGonagall gave a curt nod. "Very well, Miss Bonnefoy. Miss Howard, Mr. Richard, you have a defender among the Slytherins, who seem to know more about nobility than you do. You are not expelled, but you will have a good deal of work to do to prove to me that you deserve to be in Gryffindor. You will be confined to your common room during the festivities this evening, and the Slytherin Head of House and I will devise a fitting punishment for you."

They might well have winced. Punishments by the Slytherin Head of House were no longer to be feared as Snape's had been, but Professor Sinistra had acquired a reputation for torturously dull detentions.

"Return to your seats. Class will commence."

Transfigurations commenced, but Lucia did worse in it than usual and hurried away as soon as she could. The festivities would be beginning soon in the Great Hall, but she had no stomach for them.

Her first months here had been so happy! Was it always going to be like this now, having to watch her back at every moment and being accused of being a Death Eater just because of her ancestry? It had all come on so suddenly she felt as though she were reeling from a blow to the head.

"What are you crying for?" Myrtle asked curiously as Lucia sank down on the edge of the bath, not sure why she'd gone there. "You look just like Draco when you cry, you know."

That did not help. "Why is it so unfair?" Lucia sobbed. "And why do I always end up defending them?"

"Aww, is poor widdle Lucia getting picked on?" Myrtle asked sarcastically. She shouted, "Join the club!"

"I know just what it was like for you now."

"You could come back and haunt them with me."

"No! I'm not like that!"

"Well, fine. Your _brother_ thought it was a good idea. _He _knew what it was like."

"Draco? When did he ever get picked on? He was usually the one doing the tormenting."

"Harry Potter never left him alone, you know. He was very sensitive, and Harry was always getting after him."

Lucia snorted. "From what I've heard, both of them had nasty tempers and made their interpersonal problems worse by attacking each other. Neither of them knew how to control themselves. _I_ do."

"Where's the fun in that?"

"Where's the fun in making matters worse?" she retorted, then sighed. "I don't know what to do. If I attack people back, I'm just as bad as they are. If I control myself, they won't stop tormenting me."

"Did you ever try not keeping it all to yourself?" A tall form was looming over her. Chador. She stared up at him in surprise and tried to whisk her tears away. He sat down, his movements slightly stiff. "Did you think no one noticed, then?"

"I didn't think _you_ did," Lucia muttered. He'd been rather preoccupied and short-tempered recently.

"Hrmph," he said shortly. "Astoria Greengrass says you're to go to the party."

"Astoria can't tell me whether to go to a party or not!" she aid indignantly. "Anyway, I don't want to go. It feels like everyone hates me, and the minute I go in there they'll all stand up and throw their food at me."

Chador gave a snort that might have been a laugh and might not have been.

"Why aren't _you_ at the party?"

"Because I was looking for _you."_ He softened slightly. "I didn't want to go either, actually."

Lucia stared at him. Had he gotten thinner? Had she missed something going on in her preoccupation with herself? He wasn't just her tutor: he was her friend. "Chador—" She stopped short. "Chador, what's that?"

"What?" he asked warily.

"Here—just at your hairline." She touched the hair at his temple. "It's…_feathers!_ Growing out of your skin—like hair. Just very tiny black feathers."

"Merlin's beard!" he snarled and jumped up and peered at himself in the mirror. He clutched the edge of the sink and seemed to make a great effort but finally smashed his fist against the mirror and sat down again, his shoulders slumped, his face pinched. The feathers were still there.

"What is it?" Lucia whispered.

"I don't want to discuss it," he snapped. "At least—not here."

"I want to know!" Myrtle announced.

"Well, you don't exactly have a reputation for discretion, have you?"

"Fine! Lucia, don't let _him_ come here again, or I'll never tell you any more about Draco." She dived into a toilet and was gone.

"Merlin's beard," Chador said again, only softer this time. "I've messed things up for you, haven't I?"

"Not really. She always gets over it. What _is_ wrong, Chador?"

"I _will_ tell you, Lucia. I don't think I'd mind telling you so much. Only Luna knows, so far. Only not here and now. I came because Astoria says you're not supposed to hide anymore."

"What do you mean?" Lucia asked wearily.

"All the prefects and the Head Boy and Girl have gotten together to sort their Houses out. It was Ginny's idea, when she found out what the Gryffindors have been up to."

"Ginny Weasley?" She had stayed far away from Ginny Weasley this whole time, certain she knew what a Weasley must think of anyone with Lucia's relatives.

"Yes, you know, Head Girl? Famous Gryffindor? Mad Quidditch skills? Practically fiancée of Harry Potter?"

"I know who she is. Who doesn't? What does she have to do with it?"

"Well, she reckons it's her job to straighten all this out, being Head Girl and a Gryffindor and all. I think Luna told her most of it. She and the prefects are refusing to let their Houses go to the feast until they've got their priorities straightened out. I almost wish I _had_ gone, just to see the looks on the teachers' faces when they see an empty  
Great Hall!" For a moment color came into his face as his eyes brightened.

"Wait—is this about _me?"_

"Only a little. You're sort of the symbol for the whole thing, an innocent Malfoy, a straight-forward Slytherin, a victim of prejudice, however you want to call it. It's really about doing something about all this stuff people have left over from the war. You know, hatred toward whole families because of what one person did, and so on. We don't need _another_ war based on people's pain and anger, you know? That's happened before—we just barely escaped it in Croatia, my family and I. If it happens again—God help us." His face was more pinched and white than ever.

"It won't," Lucia said. "Not if there's people like Ginny and Luna and Astoria still around."


	22. Lessons

**Lessons, or**

**A Blossom As White As Lily Flower**

**Chapter 22**

Lucia enjoyed the holiday festivities after all, once the prefects consented to release their Houses, and later some of the Hufflepuffs came up to her and apologized, which really did seem to soothe over much of the hurt feelings. "I'm not a Malfoy," she said again. "Please, you've got to believe me. I've never even met my father. If a boggart came at me, it would probably take _his_ shape."

Sometimes pure honesty about things people don't normally tell others can be as disarming as "Expelliarmus." They believed her, and sometimes after that, on the few occasions when she needed it, the Hufflepuffs came to her defense as readily as the Slytherins.

Astoria, the next day, gave her a dressing-down, which she rather deserved. "What kind of unity do you think it's going to make in this school when you just _let_ people be cruel and unjust to you? That's what caused half our problems, I'll have you know, people sitting back and refusing to address small behaviors until they became so big they almost destroyed us! There's such a thing as taking self-denial and patience _too_ far. We're not going to let this place become like it was when Draco ruled Slytherin—"

Graham Pritchard put his hand on Astoria's arm. "Alright, Astoria, I think she gets the point. You get the point, don't you, Lucia?"

"Yes," she said, shame-faced. "I do."

Later she found Ginny, doing homework at the Gryffindor table. Some of the Gryffindors gave her dark looks for approaching their table, but they didn't dare say anything.

"Ginny," Lucia said somewhat nervously, "I—thank you—for—"

The girl with long, rich red hair looked up at her, disconcertingly straight-forward. "Why are you scared of me?"

"Well—you know. You're a Weasley. One of the greatest wizarding families."

Ginny laughed. "Do you know _anything_ about my family? We're about the least intimidating family in England. The most batty, maybe."

"Until you get threatened. And—and _my_ family sort of led the—the persecution against you."

"I thought you always said you weren't a Malfoy."

"I'm not. Not really. Not in my mind, where it counts, you know."

"Well, then, I don't see what the problem is."

Lucia stood still for a moment. She dared to sit down beside Ginny. "Ginny—can I ask you—why did you come back to school? You didn't have to."

Ginny grimaced. "My parents made me. 'You are going to get your N.E.W.T.s properly, young lady!' Because I'll be the first Weasley since _Percy_ to do so, _and_ the only girl. It's hardly fair, but there's not much fair about being the only girl and the youngest. 'Stay in the Room of Requirement' indeed!" she muttered, which Lucia didn't understand. "Anyway, it was better than watching Mum cry about Fred and George stalk about always looking for something and never knowing what it is and Percy trying pathetically to be helpful and Ron and Hermione sitting about all dazed and mooning over each other and Harry—" She stopped, suddenly aware that her eyes were swimming with tears. "Why am I telling you this?" She glared at Lucia's pale, pointed face and her wide, brilliant, understanding eyes. "Luna told me I would end up telling you things without meaning it. She said you had a power like that. I didn't believe her, but then, one doesn't believe half the things Luna says. Which is unfortunate, because sometimes they're _important._" She snapped her mouth shut. "There I go again."

"I'll…let you do homework, then."

"Thanks. Oh, Lucia?"

"Yes?"

"Maybe you'd like to see the Gryffindor common room sometime?"

Lucia gaped at her. A _Gryffindor_ inviting a _Slytherin_ to her common room? "Er, yes. Yes, I would."

"Alright, then."

Head whirling, she went back to her own common room for history lessons.

McGonagall and Sinistra had together devised a very creative discipline for Della Howard and Albert Richard. It would have been a punishment indeed back in Draco's day, and the two Gryffindors evidently felt it was a severe and fearsome one. They had been sentenced to taking history lessons with the Slytherins in the Slytherin common room.

A month ago, Lucia had gotten thoroughly tired of Professor Binns turning her beloved history into a dry desert and of her fellow Slytherins complaining about how boring and stupid history was. So she gathered the First and Second Years while they were struggling over their homework and began to tell them the stories behind the series of dates they were forced to hammer into their heads. Over the last month, many of the older Slytherins had gathered to listen to the tales that had always come to them out of bone-dry lectures, and Professor Binns couldn't understand why the Slytherin students were suddenly doing so well in history. He even consulted with Professor Sinistra about whether they might be cheating.

"Which," Sinistra said to McGonagall, "says something, I think. When you're afraid students are cheating because they're actually doing _well_ and enjoying their subject—maybe there's something wrong with your teaching. Much as I like dear old Binns, I'm afraid very few students have ever excelled in history here."

Della Howard and Albert Richard followed Professor Sinistra down into the Slytherin dungeon with trepidation. Perhaps they thought snakes were kept as pets and allowed to roam loose in the dormitories, or perhaps they thought all the Slytherins would be hard at work over Dark incantations in the light of a green fire. Instead they found a group of very normal-looking students who stared at them in a not-too-friendly manner but shuffled politely aside to make room and then ignored them. Even the fire was an ordinary yellow.

"So, the first legends of vampires in Romania are really nasty and gruesome," Lucia said. "Are you sure you want to hear them?"

The students—including the Gryffindors—all nodded eagerly, except for a couple of First-Year girls, who edged close together and held hands.

_Really,_ Lucia thought impatiently, _only Professor Binns could make _vampires_ boring._

Della and Albert returned to their own part of the castle in a kind of haze of Romanian vampires (deliciously shivery) and homemade cauldron cakes (one of the Slytherin First Years most unexpectedly had a Muggle baker for a father, and how he'd learned to bake such authentic wizard pastries no one knew) and a total upset of all their ideas about Slytherins.


	23. The Shadow Owl

**The Shadow Owl, or**

**A Bark As Bitter As Any Gall**

**Chapter 23**

Chador explained himself to Lucia about a week later. It was a stark, chilly November day, no snow but plenty of frost and slate-grey skies. She had spent an entire history class period writing a letter to her mother explaining how miserable October had been and how much better it was now and had gone up to the Owlery to find an owl to send it. Chador found her there trying to get one to come to her. All _he_ had to do was stick out a hand and a whole flock of them came. He chose one and tied her letter on for her.

"This one's quite dependable and also discrete. He'll know to deliver the letter when your mother's not around a lot of Muggles." He addressed the owl. "From now on, please do what Lucia asks and stop playing coy."

The owl hooted and flew away.

"Do they really understand what you're saying?"

"Of course they do. Come on. I can't decide if I hate this place or love it."

They went down and, by consent, found warmer robes in their own dormitories, Lucia's soft grey-white and Chador's his House bronze and blue, and met out in the crisp air.

"You don't mind?" Chador asked anxiously. "It's not too cold?"

"Oh, no."

"Good. I love this weather. And it's easier to talk away from the castle."

"Is it about the—the feathers?"

He swept back his hair with a faint smile. There were no feathers now. "I wanted to tell you. I don't know why, except you're good to tell things to."

"That's what Ginny said," Lucia murmured and remembered Astoria confessing with ashamed eyes only a few weeks ago how she loved Draco and despised herself for it. People did tell her things. Maybe it was learning so much about psychology with her mother.

"Luna knows, of course, but only because she found out by accident."

"Knows what?"

"Well—that I'm an Animagus. Only I never wanted to be. I was forced to be."

"_What?_ How—how can that be possible? I thought you had to learn to be, not like being a Metamorphmagus."

"You do. But I have both Animagus and Metamorphmagus ancestors as well as a natural aptitude for Transfigurations, and somehow—well, I became one without ever wanting to be."

Out of all the questions crowding her brain, Lucia grasped at one. "What do you become?"

"Isn't it obvious? An owl." He sat down on a log under a stand of trees some little distance from the school and scrubbed his hands over his pale face. Lucia sat next to him. "It was like this: My grandfather on my father's side was an Animagus—an owl of course—and several relatives on my mother's side were Metamporphmagi. I never seemed to have inherited any of it, but I _am_ good at Transfigurations, and there's a certain similarity to all of them. When Dolores Umbridge came to Hogwarts, she had access to all our records, and she had a perfect genius for horribly appropriate ways to 'punish' us. She seemed to know about me already—my grandfather and her father were enemies in some way. Nobody knows the full tale of that, really. She had no cause to punish me for a long time, because I'm naturally well-behaved, so finally she made up a rule to ban something I'd already done and called me in for detention for having done it."

"That's so…_illogical,"_ Lucia blurted out.

She surprised him into a real smile. "I don't think _reason_ was the point. On the first day she did her normal write-with-your-own-blood thing, but I think she was studying me. The next day, when I came in she told me she was going to give me a second chance to be a useful and functioning member of Hogwarts, and then she turned me into an owl."

Lucia gasped and then blushed, because her first thought, after the horror, was to wonder precisely how one could do that.

Chador read her shrewdly and didn't seem offended. "It's perfectly possible, for someone who's good at Transfigurations, though it is illegal. You know Mad-Eye Moody—well, Barty Crouch, really—turned Draco into a ferret once?"

"_What?"_

"You didn't know that? I wonder if it was as…upsetting…for him as for me. You can't imagine what it feels like to know another person has control over whether you're even human or not. We _use_ animals, you know? They're our servants. So another person turning you into an owl—and then using you—"

"Like being a slave," Lucia said in a low voice.

"Yes…"

"What was it like, being an owl?"

"Well—horribly disorienting at first. I didn't know _what_ I was, not in human terms, but I could _feel_ the owlness, the—the nature of being an owl. When you study to be an Animagus, someone guides you, and you prepare for the disorientation of transforming into something else. I had no preparation, and it was a—a horrible feeling, to be a different _thing_ and not understand it and suddenly have different needs and to see and hear differently—"

"Could you _think?"_

"Oh, yes. It was a weird, owly kind of thinking—not words at all like I usually think in, but kind of flashes, impressions, sounds and images—but it was still _me_ thinking, a continuation of my real self inside my owlness. I'm not sure if that was a benefit or not." He frowned.

"Of course it was! What could be worse than losing yourself?"

"I don't know—maybe experiencing everything I experienced as an owl, instead of having it all be a blank. She let me flap around in a complete panic in her office—and I think she enjoyed that—and then she let me go, but I had to go back again the next night, and then—" He screwed his eyes tight shut, shuddering.

Lucia put her hand on his arm and squeezed it tight until she knew it hurt. Chador opened his eyes again, and for a second she thought she saw owlness in his eyes instead of Chador-ness. Was it her imagination that his whole eyes had gone entirely black for a moment, like an owl's? He stared at her hand.

"You can do that again, if you think it's necessary. It helped."

"I know. Go on, Chador. What did she do when you went back?"

"She turned me into an owl, and then she transfigured things in her room into cats and let them chase me. For _fun."_

Lucia could only stare.

"Sometimes she let her Patronus in on the fun, too. You'd think that being chased by a Patronus wouldn't be so bad, but there's a reason Dementors flee from them. And anyway, it was composed out of _her_ happy thoughts, and those are very nasty thoughts indeed."

"Chador—what's a Patronus?"

Chador stared at her. "How can you not know what a Patronus is?"

She shrugged.

"You _have_ had a weird education. It's a spell, sort of defensive, sort of offensive. It drives away Dementors. You know about _them,_ right?"

"Yes."

"Well, it's caused by happiness, which is the opposite of Dementors, of course. Sometimes it's sparks, sometimes a shield, sometimes it takes the form of an animal that kind of represents you. Harry Potter taught us all to do it when we were in Dumbledore's Army that year, even thought it's considered beyond our level of ability." He rolled his eyes.

"Is yours an owl?"

"Oh, no. Owls aren't exactly part of my happy thoughts." He pulled out his rowan wand and said, "_Expecto patronum."_ Silver erupted from the end of it, spread out around them, and dissipated. "Bother. I've had trouble with this one lately. You have to think of something happy when you say it." He stood up and took a deep breath, looked all around them. His eyes alighted on Lucia's alive, interested face and brightened. "_Expecto patronum!"_ he said, and what came out of his wand was the last thing she expected. It was a long, slender, silvery fish, swimming serenely through the air, eventually disappearing among the tree trunks.

Chador sat back down with a grin. "Don't ask me why a fish. I have no idea what that says about my character. But I rather enjoy surprising people with it."

"I can imagine. I want to try." She pulled out her own wand. "Think of something happy? Where's the fairy dust?"

"Fairy dust?"

"It's a more reliable method for flying than brooms, I'm given to understand," she said mischievously. She thought about what her wand felt like in her hand the first time she ever picked it up and said, _"Expecto patronum."_ Sparks came from her wand, but unlike the flaring fireworks of Chador's, hers sort of dribbled out.

"It takes a lot of work," Chador said reassuringly. "You can't expect a little bunny rabbit to come leaping instantly out."

"_Bunny rabbit?_ Mine's going to be a _unicorn._ Or something."

He grinned. "I have no doubt. Do you want to try again?"

"No. I want you to tell me the rest. I can try later."

He sighed, tightness in his face again. "Fine." He produced three more fish that wound their way around them for a moment. "That's better. Well, eventually Umbridge got tired of playing with a pet owl and decided to use me like an owl, sending me to carry messages and things, though not very far away, because I couldn't be seen to be gone too often. Sometimes she wouldn't turn me back, and I'd have to sleep in the Owlery and eat mice and things." He shuddered. "But there were some not-so-bad things about it. Flying, for one thing. I thought flying on a broom was amazing, but flying on your own wings—that's _breathtaking._ Also I think she forgot I was a boy turned into an owl and began thinking of me as an owl she occasionally let be a boy, because she stupidly let me overhear things she wouldn't have done if I'd been a boy sitting in her office. I was able to keep the DA out of trouble several times and cause certain amounts of trouble for her inquisitors. I could always tell when Mrs. Norris was coming. I was the one who helped Fred and George Weasley set up for their big exit, because as a small, thinking, flying creature, I had access to more places in Hogwarts than most people. You get used to most things, you know, and I got used to being an owl half the time.

"Then the Carrows came. She had to have told them how useful I was and how fun it was to control me, because they continued the same thing. Alecto was also very good at transfiguring things, and people. I wasn't quite as…docile for them, not with them working directly for Voldemort. If they gave me messages, I lost them or took so long delivering them that it was too late. Luna helped, until she was kidnapped. She would open messages and read them for me so we could decide what I ought to do. Owl eyes have a difficult time with things like reading."

"How did she find out?"

"Well, she came up to the Owlery one day, even though they made it off-limits to students, and when she saw me she knew me immediately. I was the only nearly-black owl there, but even that's no indication, but in some things it's difficult to fool Luna. She always sees deeper into things than most people—even when there's nothing deeper to be seen. In this case, she saw _me,_ just in the form of an owl. She said, 'Oh, there you are, Chador. I've been wondering where you've been disappearing to.' We'd never been particularly close, but after that we made a lot of plans together. Hers were nearly always impractical, but there was always some element of genius to them. She always suggests impossible things and firmly believes that they can be possible."

"Things are only impossible until they're not," Lucia quoted.

"What's that?"

"Oh—nothing. Just something a fictional character my mother likes said."

"Oh. Luna would probably like that quote. But it was only a couple months later that she was kidnapped."

"And taken to Malfoy Manor," Lucia said, remembering that she had not yet heard the remainder of that tale.

"Yes. And then—well, I suppose I should have told someone, but I was ashamed. But Snape knew, and I've sometimes thought since then that he was trying to protect me. He would say, 'Use a real owl, Amycus, for Salazar's sake,' contemptuously, you know, and he would turn me back into myself, complaining that he was tired of me flapping about overhead. They say he was really protecting us all. If that's true, I shudder to think what it would have been like without him. It was bad enough with him. But then, there's the time he caught Ginny, Luna, and Neville trying to steal the Sword of Gryffindor. If the Carrows had had their way, they would all have been flayed alive, but Snape said it was much more frightening to send them into the Forbidden Forest. Which _we_ all knew was complete nonsense, but we didn't know Snape knew."

"And anyway, it wasn't even the real sword, right? So if they'd managed to get it to Harry Potter, he'd have gone around thinking those Horcrux things were stronger than the sword. Think how discouraging _that_ would have been."

"That's true," Chador said in surprise. "I hadn't thought of that. After all that work I went to to get them the key… Maybe that's how he knew they were going to try, though, and he figured it would be better if he caught them than the Carrows. And he let us be beat up a lot, but I overheard him arguing with Amycus Carrow about whether they should be allowed to use asphyxiation on the members of the DA they caught. He said, very coldly, 'They are still going to have need of what few brain cells they possess, Amycus, when the Dark Lord has finally brought them over to his side. I wish you would come up with less ridiculous and childish forms of punishment.' I wonder what sorts of things we were actually spared because of him."

He was silent a moment, and Lucia, looking at his black eyes, put her fingernails in her arm. The whites of his eyes, the grey irises, and his pupils came quickly back. He rubbed his arm ruefully. "I wish that wasn't necessary. Oh, blast." He stared at his hand. Lucia stared too. Across the back of his hand and along his fingers were tiny, dark feathers speckled with grey. Chador seemed to hold his breath and concentrate hard, and before Lucia's eyes, the feathers disappeared, absorbed into the skin.

"Yeah, that happens now. I found during the second half of last year that I could turn myself back into myself. There was a kind of knack to it that I couldn't always manage, but if I wanted to hard enough, it would happen. I only turned myself into an owl once, though. That was during the Battle of Hogwarts. I was a Fifth Year, and they insisted on evacuating everyone under seventeen, which certainly wasn't fair to those of us who had already proven ourselves, like Ginny. _Her_ family wouldn't believe how powerful she was. But most of us came back on our own—that's how all the Slytherins who fought with us got in, because McGonagall didn't seem to think any of the Slytherins would want to stay and sent them all away. When we all came back, at the second half of the battle, and there were centaurs and house elves fighting, I thought, _Why not the owls?_ I understand owl mentality now, what of it they've got. They weren't like _me,_ much less intelligent than a human, of course, but they're intelligent for animals. They like their jobs and the children, and they have this idea, if you can call it an _idea,_ that without them the wizarding world would simply cease to be. It's not a world of people doing magic: it's a world of letters being sent by people. So I turned myself into an owl for the first time—and it wasn't hard; I scarcely even thought about it but just _did_ it—and I went and got them all. Mrs. Norris already had them all riled up, so some of them went after her first, but she got away. Believe me, a flock of angry owls is a frightening sight to see. A large enough owl can take down a small human, so we went after the young and the women. Which is _not_ the proper English thing to do, but it _is_ the owl thing to do. I gave Bellatrix Lestrange _quite_ a gash across her face, though she almost killed me for it. I was going for her throat."

He smiled grimly in a way Lucia didn't quite like. Then he shuddered. "Ugg. Owls are such bloodthirsty creatures sometimes. I was more owl than human that day. I don't like it—it makes me afraid sometimes. You know how werewolves can't help turning into wolves? Sometimes I'm afraid I'm the owl version. Nobody's quite sure if I'm an Animagus or a Metamorphmagus or a—were-owl. Because I can't quite control it now. It started in summer, after the war was over. I'd have nightmares, and then I'd wake up and I wouldn't be sure if I was human or owl. And sometimes I _was_ owl—and sometimes I was only partly owl, like my arms would be wings, or my back would be all feathers, or I'd _look_ human but I'd want mice for breakfast. I think—I think that might have been worse than what Umbridge and the Carrows did. My parents took me to St. Mungo's, and they sent me to Animagi and Metamorphmagi, and now I'm taking Animagus lessons with Professor McGonagall. It's better than it was. I can control it better, but it still _will_ burst out without my causing it. Especially when I have nightmares. I still wake up and I'm an owl, though now I can make myself go back to human—mostly. There are few enough of us older Ravenclaws left that I have my own room—I think McGonagall arranged that. Otherwise the whole school would know. I never _wanted_ to be an Animagus, and the fact that I can't control whether I'm owl or human makes me crazy. It's like the stupid war is still haunting me." His hair was turning into feathers.

"It is," Lucia said. "Leave it to _wizards_ to throw magic at psychological problems. What you've got is a nice case of post-traumatic stress, not a nice case of uncontrolled Metamorphmagism."

"What are you talking about?"

"Look, when you go through something horrible, even after it stops it keeps coming back in your mind. Your mind replays it over and over. In your case, you were enslaved in owl form, so your owl form keeps coming back. There's always a physical reaction in these things, and yours happens to be a magical physical reaction. If wizards didn't despise Muggle wisdom so much, they would _know_ this."

"How do _you_ know this?"

"It's my mum's job to know all the reasons why people disappear. Post-traumatic stress is a big one. And I was homeschooled, largely. My tutor taught me history of magic, while my mother taught me psychology." She shrugged.

"Muggle psychology can't make me stop being an Animagus, or whatever I am." Now there was a line of grey and black feathers around his eyes, making him look like he was wearing a mask.

"No, but it'll help you deal with what happened to you, so maybe you'll be able to control it. So you can _be_ an owl if you want, not the owl being you."

"So what am I supposed to do, then?"

"I don't know. Find a therapist? You know, I could ask my mum. She'd know."

He hesitated. "Well…I don't think I'd mind your mum knowing. I like her."

"So do I. Chador…"

She pointed to his hand. His fingertips had disappeared into wingtips. He stared at it as if he wasn't quite sure whether to let it happen or not.

"I suppose you want to see what I look like," he said gloomily.

Lucia shook her head. "Of course I do, but not until you can choose whether to show me or not. It's not fair for me to use your…condition to satisfy my curiosity."

Chador gave her a surprised smile. "Alright, then, I won't. Look." His fingers were reappearing. "It seems like a Patronus charm. A more cheerful mood helps me control it."

"Well, then, maybe you should take me flying. On your broom. And—concentrate on your hair and eyebrows."

He put his hand up to them. "_Expecto patronum,"_ he murmured, and his black hair was back.

With a raised eyebrow, Lucia made a motion with her hand like a fish, and he laughed.

"_Accio broom!"_ he called and mounted it when it came. "Are you ready?"

"As ready as I'll ever be for flying," she muttered and got on behind him.

"You don't have to hold on _quite_ that tight. We haven't even left the ground yet."

"Sorry."

He kicked off, and after a while she decided that maybe flying wasn't so bad, when the pilot knew what he was doing.

* * *

**Author's note: "Everything's impossible until it's not!" was said by Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation.**


	24. Advice

**Advice, or**

**Stone Pain In The Stony Heart**

**Chapter 24**

_What you need, _Dita wrote to Lucia, _is a Wizard doctor or wise person who isn't afraid of Muggle ways, or a Muggle therapist who is very familiar with wizarding ways. Do wizards really think all wizard problems are caused by magic? Don't they think there's anything that transcends the differences between the two races? There's plain old human nature at the base of all of it._

_ But this is not the practical answer your friend needs. My suggestion is that you find others like him, who are still struggling—there has to be some, after what that school went through—and start a support group with some wise adult to lead it. Maybe the Muggle Studies professor will know about psychology. They have to know you can't just point a wand at a young person's brain to fix it, surely, or else they would already have done so for Chador._

_ As for you, my dearest ridiculous child, whoever taught you that the 'ordinary' miseries of school life were less worthy of comfort than war traumas? Not me. The comparative smallness of one kind of unhappiness doesn't make it less unhappy; a cruel action is still a cruel action, whether it's hitting someone with a bludger (whatever that is) or hitting them with a car. I said be patient and understanding, not be a doormat. Still, I'm glad you erred on the side of patience rather than the opposite._

_ I miss you terribly, but I know that just now your brother needs me more than you do. You're just learning to fly, but he's had his wings terribly, terribly broken. I've been in Prague and now Krakow for quite some time, following his footsteps around these old, beautiful, fierce cities. He admired the Poles when he was here as a boy, so strong and proud they were. I wish he'd known more of the history of their courage and resistance during World War II and Communism—perhaps he would have found inspiration in them. I've taken a room he had in Krakow, not a month ago—pretending to be a near-Squib for the benefit of the wizard neighbors (who are very excited that I have a daughter at Hogwarts, let me tell you!)—because I need some time to finish translating the last year of his diary. He didn't dare to write often, not with Voldemort in his very house, but occasionally he _did_ dare. There's shame between these lines of ironically dancing men, Lucia, deep, tearing shame, partly for what his family was reduced to, but also for what he was forced to do. Oh, Lucia, he was forced to do things no young person should even have to think about. And there was no Myrtle for him to talk to. He had no outlet except a few stolen entries in this journal. I don't know all the words he used (what's Occlumency? he was obsessed with it), but I can read between them. I can only hope—pray—that his abjectness will help turn his life around, be the making of him instead of the breaking of him._

_ Oh, dear, this isn't a terribly cheerful letter, is it? Well, I'm nearly to the end of the diary, and I have a feeling it's going to give me the final clue I need to track him down. All my love, Mummy._


	25. The Hawthorn Wand

**The Hawthorn Wand, or**

**The Green Winter Of The Holly-Tree**

**Chapter 25**

In the second week of November, Professor McGonagall called the whole school together for a general assembly. Everyone buzzed with curiosity to find out what it was all about until she took her place and raised her voice.

"Students, I have suspended classes for the day for a solemn and yet a joyous occasion. Over the last months you have all had a series of Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers, as each of your professors have taken their turn in teaching you their own particular methods. Some of you have also had the benefit of learning from older students who proved themselves very ably in the War. Next term we will be bringing in guest lecturers from among the greatest wizards now living. Until the Christmas holidays, however, we will have a guest teacher of the most distinguished sort. Though only a student, he withstood the most fearsome Dark attacks through quick wit, deep loyalty, and a good heart. I think you know who I'm talking about. Hogwarts, please welcome Mr. Harry Potter."

The din in the Great Hall was perfectly deafening as the slight figure of a mere boy walked down between the tables. He looked as if he was not precisely enjoying the cheering, the clapping, the people trying to touch him, the sudden sobbing. Standing with everyone else, Lucia didn't clap but only watched him intently and hoped he didn't see her, didn't even know she existed. He was shorter than she expected, thinner, younger. Technically an adult at eighteen but still so very young-looking. There was something of Chador's pale, pinched look to him, and something of Astoria's stout-hearted, on-with-life spirit.

Across the tables, she caught a glimpse of Ginny, standing very still, pale with her freckles standing out on her skin. In one of those confess-things-to-Lucia moods that came over people now and then, she'd told Lucia all about her understanding with Harry, that they had something between them to pursue but that he was too tired and too conflicted to pursue it. That was really why she had gone away to school, to give him space to recover, telling him, "I waited for you since I was ten. I can wait longer."

Professor McGonagall had gone pink with pleasure as she welcomed Harry up onto the dais and finally managed to quiet the Hall after an interminable amount of time. She seemed to know he didn't want a speech made about his greatness or courage or whatever else and said instead, "Mr. Potter will take each of your Defense Against the Dark Arts classes in turn. He is here so you can learn from him, not for your hero-worship. He has been a student just like you and not even as good a student as some of you." (Harry grinned at that.) "Today, though, he is here to tell you a story. His story, as you have not yet heard it. Of course you have all heard the essential tale, such as was in the newspapers and official releases, but he asked my permission to come and tell you all the full tale of his dealings with Voldemort. He feels that you, students, deserve to know the complete truth about his side of what happened. Mr. Potter, the floor is yours, for as long as you want it."

Clearly he was not yet at ease with giving speeches, but not a sound other than his amplified voice could be heard in the Great Hall as he stumbled his way through his first remarks, and soon he fell into a natural pace of storytelling. It was a very, very long story, and no one cared. No one wanted the food that came halfway though. Only the story mattered. Gaps were filled in—more were created. Everyone knew Severus Snape was a hero—no one knew it was because he loved Harry's mother. Everyone knew Peter Pettigrew was a Secret-Keeper and a great traitor—no one knew he'd lived with the Weasleys for years as a pet rat. Everyone knew Voldemort had gone to Hogwarts as a child—no one knew it was Albus Dumbledore who brought him from his Muggle orphanage. They drank up the tale as only students can, students who have suffered and never been trusted with the full truth behind their suffering.

And then they all went away quietly to their Houses to spend the rest of the day and night talking endlessly to each other about every detail. Lucia was not the only one who noticed Ginny lingering behind in the Great Hall and Harry giving her a look that was somewhat shy and apologetic and wholly besotted.

The next day Lucia learned, somewhat to her dismay, that her DADA class would be the first one Harry would be teaching. She would stand out among all the little kids.

She sat in a back corner and tried to be inconspicuous while he said with a smile, "The best DADA teacher I ever had was a werewolf. I'm going to teach you something he taught me: how to use humor to overcome your fears."

She sat quietly out of the way while he showed them what to do against a boggart. Without a doubt if he made her come and try it, it would take the form of Lucius Malfoy and would drag her away to a tiny version of Malfoy Manor in the box Harry kept it in. But maybe he didn't want to see what frightened a Malfoy, because he never called on her, and the younger children spent the class period putting clown faces on spiders and fake ghost sheets over clowns and making the Carrows burst out into pumpkins and tulips.

Near the end, one of the students asked, "Could you show us how to do _Expecto patronum?"_

Harry grinned. Evidently he'd been expecting that. "Yes, I will. I'll never tell you you're too young to learn what you want to learn. Maybe you _are_ too young, but if you are, you'll find that out for yourself."

He showed them the technique, demonstrated the glorious stag that came from his wand. "Think back to your very best memory or your most exciting dream, and then say, _Expecto patronum!"_

No one got an animal, of course. Some of them got nothing at all, but one of the Slytherin girls got a brilliant shower of sparks. Harry congratulated her, impressed, and she announced, "I just thought of myself being Head Girl like Ginny!" And then the whole class laughed when Harry blushed.

Lucia's wand would still only dribble sparks, though. It seemed as though she could _feel_ the Patronus every time she touched her wand, but it got lost somewhere in her mind. As she kept trying, stubbornly, a hand touched her black-clad arm.

"You have to _believe_ it," Harry said. "Really and truly believe it, that joy is stronger than despair and that love wins out over all."

"Do you believe it?"

"Yes." He smiled, a deep, serene smile. "I carry it inside. Dementors can't bother me anymore. My mother's love still protects me."

That evening, Professor Sinistra said, "Lucia, will you come with me to the Headmistress's office, please?"

Being summoned to McGonagall's office was always an alarming thing, even when you were fairly sure you'd done nothing wrong. Lucia went with trepidation and found there Professor McGonagall and Harry Potter."

"Take a seat, Miss Bonnefoy," McGonagall requested. "Don't worry. Nothing is wrong. Harry only wanted to meet you properly."

Lucia sat pale under Harry's direct and critical gaze.

"Ginny told me about you," he said, "and Luna. They both said you'd be afraid of me."

"Not—not _afraid,_ precisely," she answered. "Not of _you._ But of giving you bad memories, and of you thinking I'm like Draco."

"_Draco_ has no power of me. When I have bad memories, he's not even in them. He was a stupid and pitiable git, and that's all that's to be said for _him."_

"No, it's not!"

They were both slightly shocked at her outburst.

"He's my brother," Lucia said finally. "He's a stupid and pitiable git, and he's my brother. So I—I can't just pass him off as somebody else's problem."

Unexpectedly, Harry smiled. "No worries about anyone thinking you're like Draco. You should stop worrying about that. You don't even look like him—even though you do."

Lucia smiled back and made a sudden decision. "He's missing."

"Missing…?"

"Disappeared. Gone. Run away. Narcissa hired my mother to find him."

Sinistra and McGonagall, still there with them, looked as shocked as Harry.

"Hired a _Muggle_ to find _Draco?"_

"Yes. That's how worried she is. His time under Lord Voldemort kind of drove him out of his mind. He's worse off than _you._ Maybe—maybe he suffered almost as much as you did. In different ways."

"Ways of his own making," Harry said sharply.

"Some, yes. But mostly ways of Voldemort's making."

Harry stared at her, and then he nodded, once. "I want you to give this to him."

He handed her a golden brown wand. She took it slowly.

"Hawthorn, unicorn hair core. Ten inches. Reasonably springy. You took it from him. It's yours."

He shook his head. "This is mine." He pulled out his own wand of white wood. "It fits me. That one works for me very obediently, but it doesn't _fit_ me."

"But why give it back?"

Harry shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe because his mother saved my life. Maybe because of you."

"_Me?"_

"You believe there's hope for him. I don't know if I do, but you do. Give that to him when you think it's the right time."

"If I ever meet him."

"You've never met him?"

"No. But I hope to. I just hope he doesn't despise me. Do you think his wand will work properly for him again, since it switched its allegiance to you?"

"I don't know. I'm giving it up freely, so maybe it will. But if it doesn't…maybe that's all the better, in case he keeps on being a stupid git."

"It'll be interesting to see what'll happen when someone gives a wand back. I wonder if anyone has ever done it before." She put out her hand toward Harry's wand. "May I—?"

He held up his wand. She didn't take it, only touched her fingers to it and felt the familiar _frisson._ More than familiar. It wasn't quite like touching her own wand, but it was more than touching the average piece of holly. There was close acquaintance but not intimacy.

Harry was giving her a quizzical look through his glasses. She unwrapped her own wand. "Look. No—touch it."

He touched it and gave her a startled glance.

"Holly. The same tree as your wand. Maybe the same branch. And the core—unicorn hair. The same unicorn as Draco's."

_"What?"_ All three of Harry, McGonagall, and Sinistra said it at the same time.

"I know. That's what I said. Hollies are poisonous—but they protect. Unicorns are dangerous—but they're living works of art. Hawthorn is related to roses, and it brings hope, heals broken hearts. It all _means_ something, and I'm going to find out what."

Later she told Chador, "He offered to help me with _Expecto patronum,_ but I said no."

"_Why?"_

"Because you're teaching me."


	26. On Cowardice

**On Cowardice, or**

**With Fearsome Things To See**

**Chapter 26**

_ Dear Mummy,_

_ Harry Potter's not what I expected at all. He's not big or grand or even powerful. He's just like another boy at school. Except…he's not. He's…I don't know…_deep_? It's like there's so much more to him than to most other boys I know his age. He very soon makes you think that being big, grand, and powerful in all the ways I expected is a bit overdone and not really _real_ and that real power is like his—in the eyes, sort of. I don't know if I'm making any sense at all._

_ He told me about Draco, because I asked—_his_ view of Draco, which Astoria says is fairly accurate, though Myrtle thinks Harry was just about as bad as Draco. I doubt that. I don't doubt Harry has a temper, but I can't see him being as outright _nasty_ as everyone says Draco acted. It's that whatever-it-is in his eyes. Whatever his temper's like, Harry kept choosing goodness. Whereas Draco—we know what he chose._

_ One thing I didn't expect was that he thinks of Draco as a coward. Of course, being a Gryffindor he'd think of anyone as a coward who didn't run straight into danger without thinking, armed with nothing more than a teakettle. Or a wooly jumper. But he says Draco was always running _away_. I don't know why that bothers me so much. It seems like it's easier to fix an evil heart than a cowardly one. Is that true?_

_ Anyway, Myrtle says it's not true—not _that_ true, at least. She says he was scared to death about what he had to do in the Room of Requirement, with the big cabinet that he had to fix so people could transport into Hogwarts from Diagon Alley. It was very dangerous to fix, because he had to experiment on himself, and he could have killed himself or hurt himself badly, but he _still did it_. Because there was something worse: Voldemort killing his parents. Is that courage? Doing what you're afraid of because something worse might happen? Of course it's not like doing something you're afraid of because it's _right_. Myrtle doesn't understand that distinction, or she doesn't want to. But at least contradicting Harry is getting her to tell me more about Draco. She doesn't dislike Harry, says he was decent to her, but people who have been pushed around sort of get her sympathy, and she only ever knew Draco when he was being pushed around by Voldemort._

_ And you get to go to Romania! That's exciting. All these years traveling around the Continent, and you've never been to Romania. Do you think it's true you really have Romanian gypsy ancestors, like Grandfather Bonhomme thought? It would explain why you like to travel so much. But I don't know if I really understood what you found in Draco's diary that makes you think he decided to end up there. He wrote the end of it months ago, before he even left. Anyway, please find him soon. I'm getting a little anxious. _

_ Love, Lucia._


	27. Found

**Found, or**

**Freeze, Freeze, Thou Bitter Sky**

**Chapter 27**

Dita had enlisted magical help for the first time. Dressed in robes given her by Narcissa Malfoy and representing herself as a Squib entrusted with a commission to find a foolish young man who had lost himself in the mountains, she hired, with Narcissa's gold, a few of the poor but hardy Romanian wizards who dared penetrate into the more remote, legend-filled countryside and were well-used to helping find foolish daredevils who wanted to prove themselves. In the rural corners of Romania, no one had ever heard of a Malfoy, scarcely even of Voldemort, though it is certain they would have before too long if not for the events of the preceding spring. She had no fear of giving them a complete description of Draco (in German, to the few among them who spoke German, as she had no Romanian) nor of giving them a few of his belongings. Searching for him by magic, she reflected, was very much like searching with dogs. You gave them some possession of the lost person, and they traced him as by scent. It was very cold and snowy, and she did her best to hide her continual astonishment at the magical marvels they produced for keeping warm.

The end of Draco's diary had possessed only a few lines. It said life had become a blank, and he could not imagine the twilight life of vampire victims to be any worse. Then she remembered his younger self having a certain fascination for vampires, calling them beings a Pure-Blood might not be ashamed to consort with, elegant beings with a proper sense of dignity and a very clever way of keeping control over lesser mortals. It was something he never dared tell his father, because Lucius looked down on part-humans, of course. He could never convince his parents to take him to Romania or those parts of Hungary where vampires still lived in relatively large numbers. Dita remembered thinking, _Oh, no, not another nasty mythical creature that really exists! Of course Draco would be attracted to them._ And then she passed over it, but now, after reading through the devastation and desolation the last year had wrought in a family and a boy, and after following the boy in his aimless wanderings across Europe in search of a futile rest, she had no need of a diary to know his future intentions. She knew him by now and knew where his bleak mind would be turning. Maybe he would wish to be prey to vampires, to let his life drift away into the grey haze of their unturned victims or be fully transformed into a different sort of thing and no longer have to be what he was. So she went to the source of all vampire tales, Transylvania (because of course a Malfoy would _have_ to be grandiose even in his despair), and caught rumor of a tall, pale, wraith-like man climbing deep into the mountains, against the advice of everyone who saw him.

And then, after more days in the snow and cold than she ever wanted to spend again, following an elusive trail of what she could only think of as "magic breadcrumbs," her translator told her in German that they had located him.

It was a cave in a high valley some ten miles from the nearest village. The firelight flickering inside was blue.

"If it is the young fool you are seeking, you must fetch him immediately and force him to come with us, for there is coming a blizzard and there will be no passage for days, even for wizards. If it is not your young fool, you must make him come anyway."

Dita stepped inside the cave with some uncertainty. After three and a half months of pursuit, it seemed entirely unlikely that she was actually coming face-to-face with her quarry. She had never had such a long chase, such a dangerous prey, or one whose fate was so important to her. Lucia's brother. Lucius's son.

The cave was a practically perfect cave; she didn't quite believe in it. It had a narrow opening that opened up into a smooth, round cave with a fire in the center, blue fire, no smoke. A figure was curled up beside it in what looked like a common Muggle sleeping bag, and long, tangled white-blond hair gleamed pale blue in the light. _Lucia's hair,_ she thought.

She was about to wake him with a gentle, "Draco," when he jerked in his sleeping bag and let out a shriek. "_No—please—no!_ Let them alone! I'll do it—I'll do it—let them alone!"

Dita looked down at him a moment, put a hand to his forehead, and then turned and went back out of the cave. "He can't leave here tonight," she told the translator.

"What? Lady, he _must."_

"He's not in a fit state to go anywhere. I'll stay with him. Leave us all your supplies and simply return for us when the storm has passed. It is a very secure and comfortable cave, and we'll be quite alright."

"Lady, do you know what this area of the land is known for?"

"Of course I do, but do _they_ go out in the middle of blizzards?"

"It is not known what they might take it into their heads to do. They are not your 'cured' English vampires," he said darkly, but he could see she was determined. "We will set protective incantations around the cave and make the entrance invisible, but you must know that is no determent if they wish to get at you. You are a—what do you English call it? A _Squib_—is he also?"

"No, I have reason to believe he is very talented at magic." She didn't tell him she wasn't sure Draco was in any condition to do any magic. "I thank you for your help. I will pay all your trouble well."

He raised his shoulders and his eyebrows, the other men left their packs, and Dita was left alone with a raving Draco in a cave, a blizzard approaching, and vampires just over the next hills.


	28. Blank

_Mummy, the owl returned my last letter. Where are you?_


	29. The Storm

**The Storm, or**

**When December Blights Thy Brow**

**Chapter 28**

"Who the basilisk's fangs are you?" Draco snarled. Dita thought perhaps he didn't precisely mean to snarl, but his voice was all hoarse and caught up in his throat.

"My name is Perdita Bonhomme. I'm here to find you, and I have found you."

_"Find_ me? Don't you know I came out here so I wouldn't be found?"

"There are people who want you to be found. You know perfectly well that you don't exist alone."

"I _want_ to! I'm not going home!"

"I'm not here to make you go home. I'm here to help you."

_"Help?_ I don't _need_ or _want_ help." He really was snarling now.

"And that's why you've spent the last twenty-four hours delirious and screaming, because you don't need any help."

Draco clenched his teeth, having nothing to say to that. Then—"Twenty-four hours?"

"Give or take an hour. You're sick, and it's more in your mind than in your body."

"Then fix me and go away!"

"Can't go away. Trying to fix you," she said laconically. "The unfashionable way. Magic isn't going to do it, and I don't think you'd want it to if it could. Why else have you been wandering around all the Muggle areas of Europe, if not to run away from magic? But _magic_ didn't cause your problems. Evil did, and evil exists everywhere."

"What have you been doing, stalking me?" He looked rather pathetic, lying shivering in his sleeping back and trying to give her the glare that had withered the hearts of many a younger student. Dita was impervious to glares.

"Yes, and even worse than that. I've been in your mind."

"No! Unless you're the greatest Legilimens who ever lived, you haven't!"

"I am not. You've been well-trained in Occlumency, haven't you?" (Lucia had explained it to her in a letter recently, making one section of his diary more clear.) "Your aunt was not kind to you in your training, but she was effective. You managed to hide a great deal from Voldemort."

He flinched at the name. "What are you?" he rasped at her. "How can you know these things?"

"You would be surprised to know what I really am. For now…call me your un-fairy godmother. You're stuck with me for however long this blizzard lasts. It's kind of a godsend, this blizzard. Now, Draco, stop arguing and let yourself sleep for once."

He flinched again as she touched his forehead, and then, against his own will, his eyes went shut under her gentle, stroking hand. She passed it over his pale hair, thinking how often she had done exactly the same thing for Lucia when _she_ was sick, how exactly alike their hair was, how in this sudden peaceful repose Draco's hard, wild face became so much like his sister's in her repose. If Dita had any magic of her own about her, it was in her ability to soothe with a touch and to reconcile with an expression of her blue eyes. When Draco woke up, he would have already have accepted her presence without further struggle.

Further struggle ensued, but it was not with Dita's presence but with her steady attempts to prise her patient open and let his many layers of trauma, training, cowardice, and courage come to the light. The storm raged outside, but inside the storm was even stormier. Sometimes Dita imagined she heard shrieking voices on the wind; other times Draco's nightmares drowned out the storm.

"You've been trying to repress all this for six months," she said on the fourth day, when he had finished swearing at her in more languages than she knew a boy of eighteen was capable of. "Some things won't be repressed. You spent two years under the control of a person of pure evil. You spent most of one year in his day-by-day company, a prisoner in your own house, watching your parents being continually degraded, yourself being used like a tool for the torture of others. You never thought you had a conscience until then, did you? In a situation like that, I suppose a conscience would be as much a part of the torment as anything else. You, Draco Malfoy, scion of a great house, Pure-Blood, ruler of others—you hate yourself more than you ever hated Harry Potter."

He never swore at her again after that. He was too frightened of her. Probably no one had ever known him before.

On the fifth day, Dita nearly screamed in terror when a head popped out of the blue fire she made Draco keep going (without telling him she couldn't do it herself). She was exhausted and slightly on edge.

"You, Lady, are you still alive?"

She realized it was her translator, looking out of the fire with a flaming blue face. Unsure of whether Draco knew German or not, she swallowed her many questions. "Yes, entirely alive."

"We are told that owls come this way and are turned back by the storm. English owls."

"Oh, no. I expect that's my daughter. Can you get an owl sent to the Hogwarts School in England to Perdita Bonhomme's daughter to say I've found the person I came to find and we're both well?"

"I can get word to the Owlery in Oradea."

"Thank you. I'm very grateful."

The head disappeared, and she pressed her hand to her heart to try to still its thumping.

"You have a kid at Hogwarts?"

She turned to look at Draco, who was sitting back with his arms crossed, his hair tumbling forward about his face and shoulders. It was the first time he'd shown any interest in her life. "Yes, my daughter."

"What House?"

"Slytherin."

He was surprised at that.

"What did you expect, Gryffindor?"

"Hufflepuff."

She realized that had been something in the way of a joke and laughed. "No, sorry to disappoint."

"I never heard of a Bonhomme girl in Slytherin."

"Well, you wouldn't. It's her first year."

"Lucky her."

"Something more than luck, I think."

"What's she like?"

She stared at him in surprise, then realized he was probably sick of thinking and talking about himself.

"She's very powerful. Much more so than she knows. But then, I suppose any child of her father's would have to be. But she's not like him in much else. She's bright and inquisitive and sensitive, too intelligent for her own good, maybe, quite tender-hearted, fascinated by everything. She made her own wand once, out of holly. She might become a wand-maker. Or a history teacher. Or anything in the wide world she wants."

"She doesn't sound much like a Slytherin."

"That's only because you don't know what Slytherins are capable of."

"Does she have a name?"

She glanced at him. "Lucia. I named her after her father."

"What—Lucius?" He gave a hard laugh. "That's my father's name."

"So I've been told. I met him once, you know, nearly seventeen years ago now. He was not terribly much older than you then. You look exceedingly like him." He really did, she thought with a wrench inside. Very much, in his current state, as that shell-shocked, terrified, still-arrogant Lucius Malfoy had looked as a young man not yet thirty.

"Did he send you to find me?"

"Oh, no. He would never ask for _my_ help. Anyway, I've never seen him since then. It turns out I've done well to keep well away from him."

"That's what I intend to do," Draco muttered.

"You can't. He's your father. He loves you."

"He doesn't. He doesn't love anyone but himself."

"Do you even realize what he did for you?"

"What are you talking about? What did he ever do other than to enslave me to—" He looked terrified of saying the name but finally did so defiantly. "—to _Voldemort?"_

"He abandoned Voldemort to save you. He abandoned what he considered the greatest power in the world to search for you and keep you from harm. He had no idea that Voldemort would lose the battle and be destroyed. He only cared to find you."

Draco was silent.

"Your father is a selfish man, Draco, and you've learned to despise that in him. But so are you. He is a hard man, and a weak one. And so are you. You hate that. He's a cruel man who abuses the power given to him by his family position and his magical talent, and you have learned how terrible a thing those traits are. But you've done exactly the same. There's little in your father that he hasn't passed on to you. But you are beginning to hope for a change, and if you can change, he can too."

There was no sound from Draco. She looked at him and found him sitting with his eyes closed. He pretended to be asleep for a long time. She took the opportunity to get some real sleep.

Some time later Dita was awakened by a sound that cave had not yet heard. It had heard plenty of screaming, plenty of cursing, plenty of arguing, and a very small amount of quiet conversation, but it had never yet heard Draco sobbing with his head down on his arms.

Dita got up and sat deliberately next to him, drew his head down to her shoulder, and held him as if he were her own Lucia, distraught over some childish bullying or her own inability to make a minor charm work. Lucia's distresses had been small things compared to Draco's, but he held her mother tight around the waist and cried exactly like she used to.

It was all quiet later. The long storm had finally abated, but the magically-protected entrance was packed with snow. _I suppose we can always Apparate out,_ Dita thought, but she didn't mention it to Draco. Who knew how long he intended to stay here.

Suddenly Draco started to his feet. "They're coming!" he cried.

"Who?" She strained to hear what he had heard.

"The vampires. They've been playing with me for weeks. They knew I wanted to get bitten, so they refused and only taunted me. Now that I—I don't want to anymore, they've come. They'll like _you,"_ he said sharply.

Now she could hear the voices on the wind where there was no wind. She realized she had never really believed they actually did exist. "What do we do?" she cried, and she could see he was as terrified as she was.

_"I don't know!"_ he shouted at her.


	30. Worries

**Worries, or**

**The Rock-Flower Of Hawthorn**

**Chapter 29**

"Lucia, please go up to Professor McGonagall's office," Sinistra said. "The password is 'Dunollie.'"

Lucia sighed. Astoria, helping her with her DADA homework, stared at her. "Why are you _always_ being called up to the Headmistress's office?"

"I don't know." Her hands were cold. "I hope it's not about my mother."

"Oh. Yes." Everyone knew she had been sending owls frantically for a week. Astoria gave her hand a squeeze. "Do you want me to go with you?"

"Well…it could be nothing."

"Shut up and come on."

Feeling like a small child, Lucia clutched Astoria's hand as they went up behind the statue. McGonagall was there alone. She looked surprised to see Astoria.

"Miss Bonnefoy, I hope I haven't alarmed you. I received an owl from Romania today. The letter was in German, for some reason."

"There are a lot of Germans in Romania," Lucia said automatically.

"I see. Do you speak German?"

"No, Professor."

"Then I will translate it for you." She unrolled a small parchment. "'To Hogwarts' Schoolmaster: Frau Perdita Bonhomme (badly misspelt) is well and with the foolish young man, only caught in a snowstorm in vampire country. Dieter Popescu.' This came from Oradea, Transylvania."

"Is that good or bad?" Lucia asked blankly.

"It seems mostly good. She has found…" her eyes slid over Astoria "…your relative, and they are both in health. They are in a dangerous area of Romania, but I am certain they will be able to take care of themselves."

"Oh…" Relief washed through her. "Thank you. She found him! I'd almost started to think she wasn't going to. In Romania…how strange."

"How long has she been looking for him, Miss Bonnefoy?" McGonagall asked gently.

"Since the middle of August."

"That is a long time."

"Her longest search ever."

"He must not have wanted to be found. I am impressed she was able to do so, under the circumstances. Now what do you think she will do with him?"

"It depends on him, don't you think? She was hired to _find_ him, not bring him home. He's an adult. I should think he would be able to choose. But—she's very good at persuading."

McGonagall smiled at her. "I hope she can do it. I wouldn't think wandering around Europe alone would be good for him, just now."

"It doesn't seem to have been. Thank you, Professor."

"You're welcome, Miss Bonnefoy."

Going down the stairs with Astoria, she said in a rush, "I like her _so much._ I didn't think I would._"_

"She takes some getting used to. But, Lucia, listen to me. Why did I get the feeling you were talking about someone you both know?"

"Well…"

"I thought your mother was looking for one of _her_ relatives, but is it one of your wizard relatives?"

Lucia gave her a sideways look.

"Lucia…is it Draco? Is _he_ the one who's been missing all this time? _Is he?"_

She let out her breath. "Yes!"

"_Hens' teeth,_ Lucia! Why didn't you _tell_ me?"

Lucia was almost afraid Astoria was going to attack her. "It was _his_ business, and his mother's!"

"And yours, and McGonagall's, and…"

"Well, McGonagall was there when I was telling Harry—" She realized that was not helping.

"You told _Harry Potter?_ Why should he care?"

"Why _shouldn't_ he? He saved Draco's life! Dumbledore gave up his life to help Draco! Narcissa saved Harry's life on account of her son! Their lives are—are intertwined in some way. But I can't just go telling all of Slytherin his doings! Even if you were his friend."

"I was never his friend," Astoria muttered. "I was just a younger kid in the background always glaring at him. _Salazar,_ Lucia, you don't know what it's like—"

"Loving someone who's missing? Yes, I do."

"Suddenly discovering someone you love is missing. Has been missing for months. Isn't being searched for by anyone but a _Muggle._"

"A _Muggle,"_ Lucia flared, "who is an _expert_ at finding people and has tracked a _wizard—_a _Dark_ wizard—across Europe for months and may now be responsible for rescuing him from vampires!"

"Alright—alright—I'm sorry. I don't have anything against Muggles. I just don't know any."

"And you've learned from people like Draco that they're _stupid._ Well, they're not."

"I don't _know_ them. But I've often thought this term that I'd like to know your mum."

Lucia stared at her. "Astoria—if my mum comes home in time for the Christmas holidays, would you like to spend a few days or maybe a week of it with us?"

Astoria answered almost before the words were out of her mouth. "_Yes!_ You can't imagine how dreary Christmas is at my house. Especially—now. With Daphne. I can't see Christmas being dreary at your house."

Lucia laughed. "No, it's not. If she get out of Romania in time, I'll ask her."

* * *

**Author's note: Dunollie is a Scottish castle...built by my ancestors. :D**


	31. Expecto Patronum

**_Expecto Patronum_, or**

**Would Give His Eyes For Just One Glance At Our White Hawthorn Tree**

**Chapter 30  
**

"Can they get through all the snow?" Dita asked.

"Of course they can! It'll slow them down, but only by moments!"

"Well, do something!"

"_Me_ do something? I don't have a wand!"

"Your mother said you could do wandless spells!"

"My _mother?_ She thinks I can walk on water! I've never done anything wandlessly except make a glass of wine come to me!"

"Then make some rocks come to you! It's that or nothing!"

"Why don't _you_ do something?"

_"Because I'm a Muggle!"_ she bellowed at him.

Already pale, Draco's face went white. "What—?"

"There's no time to discuss it! Can you—do you know how to Apparate?"

"Yes—but—" He was still staring at her.

"Then Apparate us out of here!"

"I—I haven't been able to Apparate recently. Whenever I think of a place, it's always either Malfoy Manor—with _him_ there—or Azkaban. I—I saw it once, in my aunt's mind." His face was so white the fire made it look blue. Dita could hear the voices outside much nearer. They were already trying to get through the wall of snow.

"Then you're a Legilimens!"

"A little. She taught me that, too."

"Then look in _my_ mind and find the place _I'm_ thinking of and take us there!"

"I don't know if that's ever been done!"

"It's that or fight off a horde of vampires with rocks and pretty blue fire!"

"Alright, I'll try!"

"Don't _try! Do it!_ Wait!" For a moment she rushed about the cave and shoved things into the bag Narcissa had given her. It was a very remarkable bag.

"What are you doing?"

"If we end up in some _other_ remote corner of Romania, we're going to need these things, or we'll freeze to death."

He scrambled to help her. They could hear the sounds of spells just on the other side of the snow. "Dita, come _now!"_

She hurried to him by the fire. His grey eyes stared intently into hers, and he murmured, "_Legilimens."_ She thought as hard as possible of the village where she had hired the Romanians. She also brought up as many cheerful memories as she could, to try to counteract the depression dampening his abilities. Last Christmas with Lucia, laughing like silly things over the crackers Miss Precipa had brought them… She could almost reach out and touch her daughter, it was that real. But she forced herself to visualize the village again and was walking about its streets until suddenly it faded away.

Draco had broken away from her, wild-eyed.

"Did you get it?"

"I—I—"

"_Did you get it?"_

Then the wall of snow was down, and she had the impression of dark figures swooping in like a flock of crows with pale human faces. Draco bent down and scooped up blue fire, shouted something, and the fire flew from his hands, blue fiery birds swooping all around them, darting in the faces of the vampires, bringing down the walls of the cave around them. He grabbed Dita and spun, and the next thing she was aware of was white snow and small buildings. She and Draco clutched each other for a moment, panting.

"You did it! Well done, Draco!"

"Why was it so important we come _here?"_ He looked around the tiny village with disdain.

"I haven't paid the men who helped me yet."

_"What?_ Of all the—" He started laughing, to her surprise, and didn't stop for some minutes. Shakily she joined in. People were staring at them.

"Draco," she gasped at last, "what _was_ that, what you did?"

"Well, you said to fight them with rocks and blue fire, so I did," he choked, which set them both off again. Finally he was able to say more soberly, "Actually, it was _Expecto patronum…_using fire. I don't know why _that_ worked, but it was the first thing that came to me. I've never been able to do it before."

"That doesn't surprise me."

"It was—it was _you_ who did it, really. It was _your_ memories it was built on. I don't have memories like that."

She put her hand on his arm. "What were the birds?"

"Crows, I think."

"My daughter's been working on _Expecto patronum._ She says it's very hard. Her friend insists that she will end up with a baby bunny, but she's hoping for a unicorn."

"Why a unicorn?"

"Her wand core is unicorn hair."

"Oh. So was mine." He kicked at the snow.

"I know. Come on."

She paid the kind wizards, who were glad to see her safe and forced them to eat a hot meal before leaving, and then they sent an owl to Lucia and took what Draco called the Floo Network to Oradea, a small Romanian city. Yet another unpleasant method of wizard travel, she reflected.

"From now on we take the train," she said firmly.

"The _Muggle_ train?"

"_Yes,_ the Muggle train. It's about time _you_ experienced the cleverness of people who live without magic. We still have two weeks before the Hogwarts Christmas holidays. I'm going to show you Europe."

"I've _been_ to Europe a thousand times."

"Ah, but you've only seen a small part of what makes it Europe. The mundane magic side. I'm going to show you the _real_ Europe, where people work with their hands and brains instead of magic. We'll go north. I think you've never been to Scandinavia?"

"No…"

"I think you'll like it. At least you'll fit in, physically. Did your people come from Sweden or something?"

They had their own compartment on the train. Draco sat back in his seat and stared at her.

"I'll have my diary back now."

"Your—"

"You forget I was inside your head. It's amazing how much you can see in the space of a couple seconds. Your thoughts are all connected together. One could get lost."

Dita rummaged in her bag. Everything was jumbled. "I kind of expected you to have to touch me, like a Vulcan mind meld."

"A what?"

"No Star Trek in your world either? You poor thing. Such a deprived childhood." She smirked at him and finally found his diary.

He took it and ran his hands over it for a moment before opening it. When he saw the lines of dancing men, he looked up at her in surprise.

"You expected it to be translated by some spell? No such luck. I had to translate every last little dancing man."

"How do you know about the dancing men?" Draco demanded.

"Please. I'm a Muggle! That book isn't exactly _obscure._ Anyway, I happen to have an _extremely_ famous detective for an ancestor."

He leaned forward, his mouth open.

"Oh, yes. He's my great-grandfather."

He settled back slowly and crossed his arms, the diary clutched against him. "No wonder you found me."

Dita smiled. That was probably the closest he would ever come to expressing admiration for a Muggle. "I hope someday you'll forgive me for reading your diary."

Draco's eyes dropped, and he shrugged. "I don't…mind," he muttered. "No one ever…understood." He raised his eyes again, and there was grey fire in them. "Your daughter is my sister."

"Yes," she said softly.

"She's almost my age. My whole life I had a sister, and you hid her from me."

"Can you blame me?"

His eyes went distant. She wondered if he was seeing that vibrant Lucia-face and imagining its owner growing up as he had.

"No. No, I don't blame you."

"Don't let this make you hate your father."

He gave a short laugh. "I saw him in your mind, behind _her._ He was rather pathetic then. He is rather pathetic now. He has always been rather pathetic, and I never saw it."

"Of course not. No child sees his father as pathetic."

"Maybe that was why he was so cruel to Muggles. He couldn't bear the thought of having exposed his weakness to _you."_

Dita's eyebrows went up. "Maybe so. I never thought of that." She smiled at him. Oh, yes, there was hope for Draco Malfoy.


	32. Of Moths and Crows

**Of Moths and Crows, or**

**The Wild Rose-Briar**

**Chapter 31**

The owl fluttered down to sit on Chador's knee and offer its letter to Lucia. He glared at it. "It's like they all recognize me, even when they're foreign."

"Well, you're in good company, at least," Lucia said absently, setting down her wand. "It could be vultures." They had been practicing _Expecto patronum;_ she had gotten to the place where she could produce a shield, but there was no hint of an animal. Ginny had once shown her the horses that came for her, and she was trying not to be jealous.

She quickly unrolled the owl's parchment while Chador stroked its head and made feathers come and go on his fingers, somewhat confusing the owl. Since they had taken Dita's advice and started a group for students who wanted to discuss their War experiences, under the oversight of Professors Sinistra and Penrose, he had had fewer nightmares and found himself able to better control his inner owl, as he called it. Mostly Hufflepuffs came to the meetings, but Graham Pritchard also came, and Luna, to everyone's surprise, and sometimes even Ginny came, bringing Harry.

Luna gave a crow of delight. "She's safe! She found him, and they're going to Finland! And she'll be home for Christmas! I'm so _glad._ And he's doing better. I was worried."

"Lucia, sometime you're going to have to tell me about this quest of your mum's. It sounds like quite an adventure. And maybe tell me about _who_ she was finding." The grey eye he cocked at her made her think he had probably guessed.

"I will," she promised, "when I have permission." She seized her wand and said gladly, _"Expecto patronum!"_

Something the size of her two hands together burst out, something glowing with just the faintest green in its transparent wings. The whole Slytherin table, hard at studying for tests, stopped and stared up at it as it fluttered gracefully across the Great Hall.

"A butterfly?" Chador said. "That is unexpected. Somehow I don't see you as a butterfly type."

"It's not a butterfly," Luna said, coming over from the Ravenclaw table.

"Then what is it?"

She smiled. "A moth. A Luna Moth."

"Do I have the wrong Patronus?" Lucia asked, staring at her. "Seems like _you_ should have it."

"No. Patronuses are never wrong. Mine's a hare, you know."

Lucia burst out laughing. "A bunny rabbit!"

"No, a _hare._ I like it. I like yours too. It fits you. Slytherin green, but _nice,_ and kind of luminous." She smiled and wandered away.

"I agree with her," Chador said. "Go away," he said to the owl. "Go get some food. You've done well." The owl flew away, looking pleased with itself. "Erm—Lucia, can I ask you something?"

"Of course."

"I mean—in private."

"Oh. Yes." She gathered up her warm robes from her recent flying lesson, and they went outside. "What is it?"

"I was wondering—would you go to the Christmas ball with me?"

"Of course."

He blinked at her. "I mean—you know, not just as a friend."

"Are you _asking me out?"_

"Well—yes. Why are you so astonished?"

"I thought you liked Luna."

"_Luna?_ Because we're friends?"

"She's worth you liking her, you know. She's worth anyone loving her."

"I know. I can't help it that I _don't._ Except as a good friend, of course. And she's not remotely in love with me, either."

"How do you know?"

"She told me. I'm not sure why, but she did. Anyway, _Luna_ is not the point."

"Sorry. Are you saying you're in love with me?" she asked curiously.

"I don't know about that—yet. I know I like you better than anyone else, and I wouldn't _mind_ being in love with you."

Lucia looked up at him. His thin face was growing red. "I don't think I'd mind it either. But…would you mind waiting? Maybe until the start of next school year? I feel too young for that sort of thing just now."

Chador laughed, more at ease. "I like your thinking. To be honest, I'm glad. I don't feel exactly ready either, but I wanted to sort of get a claim in before anyone else tried to."

"There isn't exactly a queue of amorous swains," Lucia said demurely.

He said darkly, "Just you wait."

Lucia laughed. "I'll just tell them you have the prior claim."

"Thank you," he said gravely. "We will revisit the subject at the beginning of next school year. But you'll still go to the Christmas Ball with me?"

"Yes, I will. So you walk softly and look sweetly and say nothing, I am yours for the ball."

"What?" he asked blankly.

"Sorry. Just Shakespeare."

"Oh. Well, in that case…" He bowed and kissed her hand. "Fair lady, I salute thee."

Lucia laughed again. "I've never met anyone as odd as us."

"Is that good?"

"Yes, it is good."

Another, more complete letter came later in the evening. Lucia shuddered for the danger her mother had been in, but, with the eternal elasticity of youth, the adventure of it all thrilled her. It wasn't the first close scrape Dita had gotten out of.

After bedtime, she tiptoed up to Astoria's bedroom. "Astoria, I thought you'd want to know my mum and Draco are quite safe now. He saved them both from a whole group of vampires by making a Patronus out of fire. I've never heard of that, have you? Or Patronuses working against vampires?"

"No, I haven't," Astoria said slowly. "Nor have I ever heard of Draco being able to do a Patronus."

"Mummy said it was wonderful, like a whole flock of blue crows."

_"Crows?"_

"Yes. It's not at all what I would have imagined Draco's Patronus to be. A dragon, maybe, since that's what his name means, or a snake, for Slytherin. Astoria, what's wrong?"

Astoria had her hand over her mouth. "_Crows,"_ she said, muffled.

"What?"

She uncovered her mouth. "Crows. Did you ever hear that sometimes people who are married have similar Patronuses? I don't suppose that mean that people who have similar Patronuses are absolutely _going_ to be married to each other, but…"

"But what? What does that have to do with anything?"

_"My Patronus is a raven."_


	33. Siblings

**Siblings, or**

**Ordered By An Intelligence So Wise**

**Chapter 32**

The Christmas Ball, a special gift from Professor McGonagall, not a usual part of a Hogwarts Christmas, was over. Lucia thought it would probably remain one of her most sparkling memories, all white and silver and blue. She had worn white with hints of green, and Luna had transfigured a tiny butterfly pin she had into a large, moving, pale green Luna Moth to wear on her shoulder, and Astoria had done her hair up. She almost felt perhaps she _was_ old enough for romance, particularly when she saw Chador in his dishy dress robes and _most_ particularly when an enchanted ball of mistletoe persisted in hovering over their heads until Chador kissed her once, very softly, on the lips. Life could never _quite_ be the same after that, could it?

But now she was on the train with Astoria, and she was going to see her mother again after what seemed like ages. Miss Precipa was there to meet them at the train station, and since Miss Precipa had not enough magic to fly or Apparate them home, they took a cab, Astoria's first time in an automobile.

"I can't believe the ways you people come up with for transportation!" she gasped, flinching at every vehicle that passed them on the road.

"This from the person who chases dangerous balls around a hundred feet in the air on a broom!" Lucia laughed at her. Astoria was Slytherin Quidditch captain.

"That's a _logical_ way to travel," she grumbled, but she was enjoying herself. "I should learn how to pilot one of these things. It might be fun."

"Drive. You drive them."

They stopped off in Charing Cross Road and made their way into Diagon Alley to pick up some Christmas things. On one corner Lucia saw a shop that had formerly been all closed up now full of light and noise, children spilling out the doors.

"Did George Weasley get his shop opened up again, then?" Astoria asked. "I never had much use for it—a lot of stupid stuff they carried. But still, it's nice to see it back. It's so strange to think of George being depressed. Even stranger to think of him without Fred. They were kind of our heroes for a while, at Hogwarts." She sighed.

This was the first time Lucia had been able to buy all the peculiar wizard things Miss Precipa always brought her and her mother at Christmas, and she enjoyed it immensely, but she was glad to leave again and be on her way back home. As they drove up to the house, Astoria stared out at the little while bungalow with holly trees on either side of the door, brilliant against the frozen greyness of the winter evening without snow.

"Is that what you made your first wand out of?"

Lucia nodded. "I'll show you."

Miss Precipa kissed her. "Good night, dear. I'll see you tomorrow." She kissed Astoria, too, which made the older girl go pink and try to hide her pleasure.

Lucia dragged Astoria up the walk. When she opened the door, they could hear voices in the living room. Astoria clutched Lucia's arm.

_"That's Draco!"_ she hissed.

Lucia turned white, then red. "What do I do?"

"Go meet him, idiot! I'll—I'll wait here."

She went slowly into the living room. It was warm and cheery, a Christmas tree before the window. Dita and Draco were sitting on either side of the fire, drinking tea. Seeing her, Dita made as though she would spring up, but then she stopped herself as Draco leaned forward.

She hadn't expected his hair to be so long, or his face so thin, or his eyes so overshadowed. Was she afraid of him, this wicked, Death Eater brother of hers? She thought she was, looking at his hard face, until she dropped her eyes and saw that he was clenching and unclenching one hand at his side. Then without warning she flew at him and hugged him tight and kissed his cheek and didn't quite succeed in not bursting into tears.

Draco didn't exactly know what to do, especially when he found unwarranted tears in his own eyes. He pushed her slightly away from him and said, "What are you crying for? You're a Slytherin. Slytherins don't cry."

"Oh, yes they do," she snapped and wiped her face. "You can't tell me not to cry. You don't even know me."

"If we're such strangers, what are you crying for? How old are you anyway? Eight?"

"Fifteen and a half!" she flared. "_Quite_ old enough!"

"Now, children, do I have to send you to your rooms?" came Dita's amused voice.

Lucia turned and nearly strangled her in hugging her. "Thank you," she whispered in her ear. "Thank you."

"Now you're going to make me cry, darling. Would you like some tea? We only just got home ourselves, and Miss Precipa had everything laid out beautifully for us, _and_ the tree, and even presents."

_Presents!_ Lucia put her hand into her bag and touched Draco's wand wrapped up next to her own. Harry had said give it to him when it was the right time. Was it the right time? She gazed up at Draco, who stared back with his lips pressed together in a tight line.

"Draco," she said hesitantly. "I was asked to give you this." She pulled out his wand and held it out to him.

For a moment he didn't touch it. It had been nearly a year since he had last touched it.

"Where did you get that?" His voice was harsh.

"Harry Potter asked me to give it to you. He releases it freely and hopes that's enough to make it work properly for you."

He seemed afraid to take it. Was it that it had killed Lord Voldemort? Or that he was afraid it would refuse to belong to him? Finally, glancing at Dita, he jerked out his hand and took it.

Lucia and Dita couldn't tell what the reaction was at first. Slowly he sat back down in his chair.

"It's different." He used it to lift his teacup, turn it into a tiny pig and back again. "It feels different."

Ever fascinated, she asked, "Do you think—is it yours?"

"It's not reluctant. It responds to me as it always did. But it's different." He turned the teacup back into a teacup-sized pig and whispered, "_Crucio."_ The pig looked up at him quizzically and tried to run off the edge of his chair but encountered his biscuit and crunched on it happily instead.

"You have to mean it," Lucia whispered, white-faced.

"You have to mean it, and your wand has to want to do it." He turned the pig back into a cup of tea. Now it had biscuit bits floating in it.

"Why a pig?"

"What?"

"Why would you turn a teacup into a pig?"

He suddenly snorted. "I have no idea." And with brightness in his eyes, he said, "_Expecto patronum!"_ and birds burst from his wand.

Tears came to Lucia's eyes but abruptly disappeared. "_Crows!_ Ravens—Mummy, I forgot. I left Astoria out in the hall."

"_Astoria__?_ Astoria Greengrass?" Draco exclaimed. "Daphne's little sister?"

Astoria was standing in the doorway, drawn in by the crows. "Hello, Draco." To her own everlasting humiliation, she was blushing.

Draco stared at her. Obviously he hadn't expected a grown-up, striking-looking Astoria. He probably hadn't given her a single thought in two and a half years.

She seemed to feel the need for a preemptive strike and said, "I'm trying to think of the last time we met, Draco. Was it that time you tried to turn me into a newt? Or the time you laughed at me for being as clumsy on a broom as a troll squatting on ice?"

Was it possible _Draco_ was turning red? "I—er—don't remember."

"No, I shouldn't think you would." She turned to Dita. "Thank you for inviting me, Miss Bonhomme."

"Call me Dita. Lucia has told me so much about you. I feel I know you. She told me all about how you led your Quidditch team to victory against Ravenclaw. Congratulations on that."

Dita was so deadpan Lucia knew she was bursting with mischief, particularly since Draco was flaming red by now. His eyes were demanding help from his sister, and she couldn't help but give in.

"What about that tea, Mum?"

"Yes—I'll make some more." Draco seized his wand and produced a new tray.

"Have your tea-making skills improved, Draco?" Astoria asked sweetly. "Last I remember you were always making Daphne make it because you couldn't."

Dita took pity on the spluttering Draco. "Lucia, take your brother to the kitchen and teach him to make tea properly."

Lucia dragged Draco into the kitchen. He watched her put the water on to boil in a rather dumbfounded way.

"I don't know how they do it."

"What? Who?"

"_Muggles._ Survive. They have to work so hard to do the simplest things."

"Well, Muggles have to learn to use their brains instead of magic."

He crossed his arms and scowled but didn't respond. Which, she reflected, was probably as big a step for him as an act of extreme generosity might have been for another man.

"I can't think why I never knew about you," he said while she heated the teapot.

"Dumbledore protected me from your father."

"_Our_ father. Dumbledore did a lot," he muttered.

"Yes, he did. Do you realize he protected you as much—or more—than he did Harry? He sent Harry off to die, but _he_ died for _you."_

Draco turned swiftly away, his back rigid. "I do not wish to speak of it. Not here—not now."

Lucia smiled to herself. _Not with Astoria in the next room?_ "Alright," she said cheerfully. "How long are you staying?"

"I…don't know."

"I hope you stay the whole two weeks I'm home. But when you go home, you can't tell your father about me."

"Why not?"

"Because it's my choice, not yours."

He turned back and looked at her, slowly nodded. She put out her hand to him.

"I'm glad I finally got to meet you."

He touched her hand hesitantly. "Your water's boiling."

She made him carry the tray out. As they went into the living room, they heard Astoria asking, "What's that?"

"The crèche?" Dita queried, dumbfounded. "You've never seen a nativity scene before?"

Astoria shook her head. Draco furrowed his brows at the little figures in the stable structure.

"Well, then. Bring the tea to the fire, and I'll tell you. It's the whole _point_ of Christmas, you know."

Lucia poured out the tea and handed round Miss Precipa's Christmas cake. Dita tucked herself up in her chair and began telling that old, good story to her strange, young audience.


	34. Five Years Later

**Five Years Later, or**

**The Holly Leaves Their Fearless Hues Display**

**Epilogue**

Harry and Ginny Potter came to Lucia's wedding. It was the first time Harry and Draco had met since the Battle of Hogwarts. Their wives, old school acquaintances if not exactly bosom friends, linked arms and left them alone.

"Do you think they'll talk?" Ginny asked, "or kill each other?"

"Probably neither," Astoria answered. "Best of friends they're not going to become, barely nodding acquaintances, probably. They're both as stubborn as an Australian pig-mule. But they're not enemies any longer. I don't know if that's Lucia's doing or Narcissa's or what."

"Speaking of Narcissa, I notice Lucius Malfoy wasn't invited to the wedding."

"He wasn't exactly well-pleased to meet his half-Muggle daughter, or to be beholden to a Muggle for helping his son. He's still a bigoted old git. But he's not a half-bad father-in-law, really, almost decent to me, despite my profession. Narcissa rules the manor now, and she has mellowed a good bit. She has no objections to what I do, not that it would make a difference if she did."

"But still, no one would ever have expected someone with the last name of Malfoy to be the Ministry's liaison to the Muggle Prime Minister!"

Astoria shrugged. "Lucia and her mum gave me a taste for Muggles, is all. Draco pretends to disapprove, but he doesn't, really. He's besotted with his 'aunt,' he calls her. Look at him."

Draco's discussion with Harry had been very brief but peaceable. Now he was going over to where Dita was sitting and watching her daughter (in white and green with a Luna Moth at her waist) and new son-in-law (whose hair was looking suspiciously like feathers) dancing closely. He bent to speak to her, and his face had lost its usual austere hauteur, become gentle, even tender. He whisked out a handkerchief and applied it to her eyes, then drew her up and danced with her.

"See?" Astoria said in a disgusted tone. "I practically have to _share_ him."

Ginny laughed. "You're not fooling anyone. You're as besotted with her as he is."

"Not quite, but almost. Everyone who knows her is." Her attention was drawn to the large, pale green moths flitting about above the dance floor and shedding light on everyone's heads. "It was nice of Luna to bring all these. Where has she gotten to, anyway?"

"She and that odd husband of hers had to get back to their African expedition. It's just like Luna to suddenly show up to someone else's wedding with a husband no one ever knew she had, plucked from the wilds of Nepal or somewhere. I always did think that she and Neville… Well, Neville doesn't want to go meandering all over the world, and this Rolf suits her, I think."

"I think she's pregnant," Astoria grinned.

"Do you? I had my suspicions… And so Lucia's to be apprentice to Young Ollivander! I thought all those years of studying Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures had to be tending to something interesting."

"I only hope she doesn't blow herself up."

"No, not Lucia. But now that _she_ has to go tagging all over the world after a peculiar wizard with peculiar ideas for what can go in a wand, what's Chador going to do?"

"Tag after _her_, of course. Probably keep the both of them out of trouble. He's good at that. I always thought he should have been an Auror, but he never wanted to. He says he's perfectly content being a correspondent for _The_ _Quibbler_, writing a history on wandlore, and being long-distance partner to Regulus Moonshine."

"Jack of all trades and master of, well, all of them," Ginny grinned.

"It's true. Do you think McGonagall knew what she was about when she appointed him as Lucia's mentor?"

"Wasn't it the Hat that did it?"

Astoria shrugged. "So it seems, but really, what does a _hat_ know? Lucia said it tried to put her in Hufflepuff!"

Ginny laughed again. "That's ridiculous. Everyone knows she's Slytherin through-and-through."

"Not back then, we didn't. Not the way Slytherin was then."

"You two worked miracles with that House."

"Not just us. It was Sinistra and Graham and—well, _everybody,_ really. It took a long time, but it's not a disgrace to be in Slytherin anymore, nor a danger. Look at that."

Draco and Chador had exchanged partners. Chador danced with Dita and laughed at something she said, his thin face alive and joyous. Lucia danced with her older brother, looking up at him with tremulous happiness, and he held her gently, and his self-protective hauteur was gone.

"Dita worked miracles too," said Astoria.


	35. Appendices

**Author's note: In all the names I have chosen for my OCs, I have followed J.K. Rowlings' delightful tradition of making them meaningful in some way or other. It's one of the things I like best about her books, that there's so much depth of meaning in the names and spells she made up. Here is a short appendix telling what my names and the one spell I made up mean. Following is another appendix giving the full text of the poems I used for chapter titles.**

* * *

**Appendix A **

**_Names_**

Perdita: lost one

Bonhomme: good man

Lucius/Lucia: light

Bonnefoy: good faith

Malfoy: bad faith

Precipa: from Latin, _praeceptor:_ teacher

Chador: shadow

Uil: owl

Della/Adella and Albert: brave/courageous

Howard and Richard: noble

**_Spell_**

Revibro: Reflect.

**Appendix B**

**_Love and Friendship, by Emily Brontë_**

Love is like the wild rose-briar,  
Friendship like the holly-tree—  
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms  
But which will bloom most constantly?

The wild-rose briar is sweet in the spring,  
Its summer blossoms scent the air;  
Yet wait till winter comes again  
And who will call the wild-briar fair?

Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now  
And deck thee with the holly's sheen,  
That when December blights thy brow  
He may still leave thy garland green.

**_The Hawthorn Tree, by Siegfried Sassoon  
_**  
Not much to me is yonder lane  
Where I go every day;  
But when there's been a shower of rain  
And hedge-birds whistle gay,  
I know my lad that's out in France  
With fearsome things to see  
Would give his eyes for just one glance  
At our white hawthorn tree.

Not much to me is yonder lane  
Where he so longs to tread;  
But when there's been a shower of rain  
I think I'll never weep again  
Until I've heard he's dead.

**_The Holly and the Ivy, traditional_**

The holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown,

Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.

Refrain:

Oh, the rising of the sun and the running of the deer,

The playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir.

The holly bears a blossom as white as lily flower,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ to be our sweet saviour

Refrain

The holly bears a berry as red as any blood,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ to do poor sinners good.

Refrain

The holly bears a prickle as sharp as any thorn,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ on Christmas Day in the morn.

Refrain

The holly bears a bark as bitter as any gall,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ for to redeem us all.

Refrain

**_Heigh Ho, The Holly, by William Shakespeare_**

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,  
Thou art not so unkind  
As man's ingratitude;  
Thy tooth is not so keen,  
Because thou art not seen,  
Although thy breath be rude.  
Heigh ho, sing heigh ho, unto the green holly;  
most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:  
Then, heigh ho, the holly!

This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,  
That dost not bite so nigh  
As benefits forgot:  
Though thou the waters warp,  
Thy sting is not so sharp  
As friend remember'd not.  
Heigh ho, sing heigh ho, unto the green holly:  
most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:  
Then, heigh ho, the holly!  
This life is most jolly.

**_Sea Holly, by Conrad Aiken_**

It was for this

Barren beauty, barrenness of rock that aches

On the seaward path, seeing the fruitful sea,

Hearing the lark of rock that sings, smelling

The rock-flower of hawthorn, sweetness of rock—

It was for this, stone pain in the stony heart,

The rock loved and laboured; and all is lost.

**_Green Groweth the Holly, by Henry VIII_**

Green groweth the holly,

So doth the ivy.

Though winter blasts blow never so high,

Green groweth the holly.

As the holly groweth green

And never changeth hue,

So I am, ever hath been,

Unto my lady true.

As the holly groweth green

With ivy all alone

When flowers cannot be seen

And greenwood leaves be gone,

Now unto my lady

Promise to her I make,

From all other only

To her I me betake.

Adieu, mine own lady,

Adieu, my special

Who hath my heart truly

Be sure, and ever shall.

**_The Holly Tree, by Robert Southey_**

O reader! hast thou ever stood to see  
The Holly-tree?  
The eye that contemplates it well perceives  
Its glossy leaves  
Ordered by an Intelligence so wise  
As might confound the Atheist's sophistries.

Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen,  
Wrinkled and keen;

No grazing cattle, through their prickly round,  
Can reach to wound;  
But, as they grow where nothing is to fear,  
Smooth and unarmed the pointless leaves appear.

I love to view these things with curious eyes,  
And moralize;  
And in this wisdom of the Holly-tree  
Can emblem see  
Wherewith, perchance, to make a pleasant rhyme, -  
One which may profit in the after-time.

Thus, though abroad, perchance, I might appear  
Harsh and austere;  
To those who on my leisure would intrude,  
Reserved and rude;  
Gentle at home amid my friends I'd be,  
Like the high leaves upon the Holly-tree.

And should my youth - as youth is apt, I know, -  
Some harshness show,  
All vain asperities I, day by day,  
Would wear away,  
Till the smooth temper of my age should be  
Like the high leaves upon the Holly-tree.

And as, when all the summer trees are seen  
So bright and green,  
The Holly-leaves their fadeless hues display  
Less bright than they;  
But when the bare and wintry woods we see,  
What then so cheerful as the Holly-tree? –

So, serious should my youth appear among  
The thoughtless throng;  
So would I seem, amid the young and gay,  
More grave than they;  
That in my age as cheerful I might be  
As the green winter of the Holly-tree.


End file.
